tutoringform.odt

Tutoring makes the ACM look good to the CS department. If you Tutor, have the student fill out the tutoring sheet.

We have a tutoring mailing list: tutoring@acm.cs.uic.edu, however, it is not utilized much. Mostly people ask for an appointment, and then Sean tells them to stop by any time.

We also have an irc channel

Most of our tutoring is carried out in person.

recommended strategies for tutoring

DO NOT touch the students keyboard.

Often if you are too helpful, student stop thinking for themselves. This seems to happen more early in the semester with first semesteer programmers and non-cs majors attempting to fulfill their cs requirement.

A strategy I have found useful is to have students work in the linux lab, and come for me in the acm when they need it. Most of there issues at this point are syntax problems.

Socratic Method

Once you spot a problem, instead of pointing it out to them, attempt to lead the student to the conclusion instead of telling them.

Often times, lower level programming students will not be familiar with a debugger. I often find that teaching students to use System.out.println() or std::cout for debugging is helpful. Students can then determine for themselves whether a conditional is being triggered, or if a value associated with an identifier is that they expected it to be, and how many times a loop executed.