Two Moments

Two of my favorite “teaching moments” happened this quarter while helping out in the LaIR. I put teaching moments in quotes because, firstly, I didn’t really teach anything, and secondly, they weren’t all that momentous. Moments don’t necessarily need to be momentous, but I certainly wouldn’t say “I just had a moment.” Details.

1. I was helping someone with Karel. She was doing really well. Understanding what was going on but had trouble with one small case. Her program worked fine in the world with one row, but not on a world with one column. She kept looking at the world, tilting her head in an attempt to transform the one row world into a column. I asked why she was doing this, and she said it would work if only she could turn the world. I just said “Oh,” and then it clicked for her.
2. I asked one of my students whether or not she was enjoying the class so far. They are currently working on Stanford-1-2-3, a mini-version of Lotus-1-2-3, the predecessor to Excel. (So many participles!) I told her that I thought this assignment was cool—you get to write something interesting. She responded with a rant:

I don’t think it’s that interesting. If I wanted a spreadsheet, I’d just use Excel. But like, last week, I was bored and so I opened up Boggle. That was useful. I was considering playing Yahtzee, but no, I had my share of that already.