Course offered in:

Autumn 2020

Motivation for becoming a TA: I quite liked teaching which was one of the major reasons for becoming a TA. I also was comfortable with the contents of CS101, having done some coding projects and taken it in my 11-12th as well; due to which I had a good grasp of the concepts and didn’t have to spend much time going over it. The extra income too was a cherry on the cake.

Responsibilities” I had to clear doubts of students from the theory lectures about the topics covered in them. I also had to supervise the programming exercises lab, solve doubts, help students debug their code and finally grade them whether they could solve it or not. I was responsible for about 10-12 students. I had to grade the projects too later in which I had to ask them questions about the code. Midsem and endsem invigilation was also a part of the duty.

How was your experience: This course was during the pandemic due to which everything was online, so I missed the offline interaction. CS101 is for the first year batch having 500+ students, due to this there was some bureaucracy which came along with it. Disregarding this, overall the experience was good since the workload was not too much but it was a break from the monotony of regular courses.

Time Commitment:

1.30 hr session to clarify questions and 2 hrs to conduct a lab. 15-20 mins for miscellaneous work like updating marks, etc. I would quickly revise the contents before the lab/doubt sessions but since I was quite familiar with them already this didn’t take too long. So, about 4 hrs per week.

What advice would you give to future TAs of this course: It’s best if you have a good grasp on the contents of the course and syntax too which would help during debugging. Not having a good grasp over the contents or not knowing the syntax will lead to a hard time in the lab session.