Week 6 Retrospective

I’m glad I have these weekly retrospectives because I know how many weeks have passed without actually counting myself every week. They’re all starting to blend!

What went well:

Work life balance was again great. Having a three-day weekend probably helped. This week and last week seemed much slower, and I feel much more sane. This is great!

I started coding for the next project. Doing GIR is really cool because I get to solve coding problems that I don’t usually get to solve! I was thinking about the interface between my code and the student’s code for the next project which is going to be a simplified search project, and given the constraints I have with what they’ll know by the time I give that project, I have to make my code a certain way. It’s interesting to think about, but basically from calling one function, I want to give back two return values. I’m not teaching OOP otherwise I would use an object; a friend also suggested an enum but I’m not teaching that either. The best I came up with was a list with those two values but it seems hacky and the values, depending on the code path, could be of different data types. My friend suggested my writing the main function and just calling their functions, but then the students’ code would be about 15 lines and it’d be practice on testing again. Not really fond of that, but I think ultimately what I came up with is I’ll abstract most of it away, and for the part that is exposed, I’ll write #TODOs for them to fill out exactly the part that needs to be done. I basically don’t want them to be doing busywork which takes away from learning and practicing the actual concepts I want them to be using when doing that part of the project

Some students who aren’t doing so hot in the class have started reaching out for help, and we’ve set up a plan to get the ball back on track. I’m pretty happy about that!

Having my TA’s give the quizzes is great. Also having them take the quiz so I have a rough idea on length is great. One of them also gives me really good feedback!

What could be improved:

Blackjack part 5 had a lot of unforeseen issues. A lot of re-uploading the starter and confusion around that. Mimir’s pretty bad about this — if the starter code is reloaded, students who have opened the project before need to click on the button to download the starter code onto their machine, open the file in question, then copy and paste their code into Mimir IDE as opposed to straight up importing the starter code into their Mimir IDE (there’s a button to do that but I don’t know why it doesn‘t work if the student has already opened the project). Anyway, this part had a lot of confusion, and I know it’s a lot of work. Also, one of the questions I guess wasn’t clear enough, so I’m going to have to make exceptions for it. I’m a bit scared to see the submissions tomorrow.

I discovered that for my future assignments: when I originally made them, I didn’t think about having my students write unit tests. So now, I have to essentially re-upload solution (and starter) code for all of these assignments to include the code to test my student’s unit tests. It’s a lot of work! I did figure out a way to streamline the process a bit, but it’s still a lot of work that’s tedious and not really that fun. I’m not sure whether this problem could be solved more efficiently than the way I’m solving it now, but seeing that it took me quite a bit of time to come up with the way I have right now, I’m a bit skeptical of finding another solution that’s faster.