Ted Kirkpatrick
I’m an associate professor of computing science at the Surrey campus of Simon Fraser University. We’re just down the road from Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. I received my Ph.D. in 2001 with a...
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Concept map for removing “nonconformant arguments” in Matlab/Octave
This map lays out the basic concepts for early detection of conformance errors in Matlab/Octave programs. The main point is that it is easier to detect the problem early by adding an assertion to your...
View ArticlePassing by reference and by value in Python
Consider the variable a = [1,2,3] in Python. 1. Distinguishing Novice from Competent/Expert: Given the function def doSomething(b): b[1] = 60 What is the value of a after calling doSomething(a)? (a)...
View ArticleScreencast proposal: Editing a table to clearly tell a story
This screencast will take a table that is competently-organized and improve it to expert level. I’ll use an actual table (five rows and five columns) from a draft paper that I’m revising. The current...
View ArticleScreencast—revising a table
This screencast walks through revising a table to emphasize its main result. I think this task matches our focus on competent versus expert performance. I wanted to use this screencast outside this...
View ArticleLive tutoring versus recorded lecture—Ted’s comments
Note: To get our thoughts here in good time, the members of the three-person “pair” are posting separately rather than as a group about live tutoring/recorded lecture. In compensation, we’ll keep our...
View ArticleCritique of SWC 4 video lectures on testing
Updated: Further comments on reading code at end. The testing sequence features five lectures on testing and one lecture on exception handling, for a total of one hour. I don’t actually see much...
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Final: The Python “with” statement (w/concept map, assessments, teaching...
I am about to give a ten-minute lesson on the Python “with” statement: why it is valuable, common idioms for its use, and how to know if a given type can be the object of a “with”. I will not cover...
View ArticleRound 5: Suggestion for an extra meeting (5.6+)
The final meeting of Round 5 will be a summary and discussion of our final teaching assignment. That meeting will form the capstone to the material we’ve considered in the last two and a half months....
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