How to ask questions of demonstrators

[nmitchell]

I demonstrate for the ADS course in Computer Science. It's basically a simple introduction to programming, using the Ada language (not one of my favourites). Students ask me questions, which I have to answer, but often they forget to include the question, or only place it at the very end of a rambling overview of their code. A typical interaction

Comments

[catamorphism]

I think this kind of thing could be a teachable moment -- i.e., for "explaining their approach", you could respond with, "Right, that's exactly what a recursive function is" (and then they feel like they're getting praised.) When they explain the code in excruciating detail, you could re-summarize for them in higher-level language, so that they learn how someone more experienced talks about code -- learn that they don't have to write comments like "x = x + 1; /* increments x */".

But if you do that a couple of times with the same student and they don't change the way they ask questions, then they're dumb :-)

[nmitchell]

No, by this point, I know they are dumb. They can't diagnose a simple compiler error message, and can't effectively communicate the problem they wish get help with. If they were asking a higher level problem like "why aren't we allowed to use break (or exit loop) within a loop" then I might do high-level and helping teachy thing.

I also do the teachy thing more when I'm teaching Haskell than Ada, because I like it a lot better, and the questions are a lot more fun.