Laurabelle's Blog

Yesterday was a great day in comp sci class. The first great thing was that I switched quiz sections. (For those not in the loop, a quiz section is one hour per week of class, taught by a TA, with about 20 people rather than 150. It's a good time to ask questions and discuss things, rather than in the huge lecture hall.) A side effect of the change was that I'm now taking the class for a grade; when the registrar changed it, I lost the pass/fail option, and I'm not willing to pay another $20 to change it back. Besides, I'm doing so well (perfect grade so far!) that I suspect my final grade will be extremely good. It would be disappointing to earn a 4.0 and not to be able to show it off.

My problem was twofold. Firstly, the timing of my quiz section didn't allow me much time to get out to Issaquah and work if I needed to, and Meg recently decided that in view of my taking on new iPac responsibilities, I should spend more time working at the Service Center rather than at home. There's no way I'm going to get two full days out there per week without skipping class, but at least I can make one and a half.

The other problem I had was that I hated my quiz section. If lecture has been a bit tedious for the past couple of weeks, the quiz section was boring as hell. I'm not quite sure whether to blame it on my classmates or on the TA, Darby, but it's probably the fault of both. Last week my classmates sat there like lumps while Darby led them through the exercise; every time he asked a question, they all said I don't know, all of them, one after another. So you don't know. That's fine, you're not required to know everything already, this isn't a test, so ask something! If you don't understand, make the TA and/or the prof explain it to you! Do something about it! Unfortunately, I think Darby wasn't counteracting their lassitude very well, because all he did was write the exercise code for them and occasionally ask for class response. He also exudes I-don't-want-to-be-here-ness, which is just not a good vibe. So the class was slow and boring, and I didn't want to be the only one who knew the answers even some of the time, so I got out of there.

My new section, which I attended for the first time yesterday, was blessedly exciting. Part of the fun was due to the fact that the exercise for this week was to fill out the code for a specification that was provided. So I wrote that down as requested, and then I proceeded to modify and expand it as I thought it should be done instead. While Dan (my new TA) was explaining relatively simple stuff to my new classmates (who were asking questions, yay!), I scribbled code in the margins of the worksheet. It kept me amused and interested, and I felt a sense of accomplishment at designing a system of classes that would work much better than the example provided (although that wasn't hard!).

Before I leave the topic of asking questions, I'm glad that people in Dan's section are asking questions. However, I'm not sure that they're asking the right questions. They asked things like Would you go over the constructor again? which is probably not what the question is really about. I guess I'm bringing a lot of junk in from my LIS classes, particularly the Instructional Methods class I'm in right now, but now I've got this idea of the quiz section as a sort of group reference interview, where students ask a question only tangentially related to their information need, and the instructor has to conduct a sort of reference interview to find out what that need is, in order to satisfy it.

Anyway, when I got home in the evening, I typed up the code I had written, expanded it, and debugged it. I spent much longer on it than I had intended, and it doesn't actually do anything but create a deck of cards (and print it out, to prove that it was created). It doesn't shuffle, you can't play a game with it, but by golly, it's a fine deck of cards. And if you want to read my code, it's in this here zip file.

No, I haven't done this week's homework yet. Why do you ask?