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I've been pushing the head of the class I help TA for to make it mandatory that students use PyCharm. He's still afraid that PyCharm will intimidate the users b

I've been pushing the head of the class I help TA for to make it mandatory that students use PyCharm. He's still afraid that PyCharm will intimidate the users but I think it's well worth it. We have 2nd and 3rd year students at my college who still haven't opened Eclipse, IntellJ/PyCharm/Whaterver else, or even Visual Studios. They have also never used a debugger. They have no idea what formatting standards, or naming standards are. It's crazy.

bsder 10y ago
> I've been pushing the head of the class I help TA for to make it mandatory that students use PyCharm. He's still afraid that PyCharm will intimidate the users but I think it's well worth it. Dropping an IDE and automated testing into your class is not without cost. 10% of the questions the rest of the semester will be how to do something in the IDE. And, occasionally, you're not going to know the answer. Saying "I don't know" can be intimidating to someone who doesn't have 20+ years of experience. As for source control and automated testing--congratulations, you are now Mr. IT-guy for 30 people for the next 14 weeks. And students can be really creative in wedging their repositories. To this day, I still have no idea how one student managed to create a recursive repository in Subversion. You really have to be committed to accept the cost of the things I recommended.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Heh, way more than 10% of my CS classes' questions were how to do stuff in Emacs (what my professor said we should use). I used to just use Sublime and `scp` the files back to the school server.
  - bsder 10y ago
    That's unsurprising. I would never use vi or emacs for beginners. However, I also didn't care what my students used. I taught Eclipse. One of my students said: "Is using Netbeans okay?" "Okay? That fact that you have a conception about IDE's makes me ecstatic. Absolutely, you can feel free to use whatever you choose. Just know that I can't answer questions about your IDE, so you are on your own for that." For my very senior class, I set things up so that they could actually use any of the JVM languages rather than just straight Java (Using Groovy, Jython, JRuby, etc. would have made their programs SOOOOOOO much smaller and easier). Disappointingly, nobody took advantage of it.
    - vorg 10y ago
      > Using Groovy, Jython, JRuby, etc Hope you included Scala, Clojure, and Kotlin in that list, all of which are more suitable than any of those three. Jython's been around since 1997-ish but isn't used much, nor is JRuby. As for Groovy, I recently looked into its apparent popularity at #17 on the TIOBE ranking and found Baidu was giving a result 12 times too high and Yahoo a result 20 times too high, both of which would skew the ranking. Groovy's real ranking is somewhere below that of #50 ranked Clojure.
      - bsder 10y ago
        I would have taken ANY JVM language at the time. ANy language with hash tables and tuples that wasn't so verbose would have been a vast improvement. Groovy gets a boost because of Gradle which is now the default build system for Android Studio. That's going to artificially inflate its position.
- gravypod 10y ago
  > 10% of the questions the rest of the semester will be how to do something in the IDE. And, occasionally, you're not going to know the answer. Most of the things they will need to do will be laid out for them before hand. I also have nothing against them asking me more questions. I'm technically paid by the question and it's better for them to ask these questions in an environment that is as conducive to learning as a classroom instead of needing to ask a boss/coworker on the first day of class. > Saying "I don't know" can be intimidating to someone who doesn't have 20+ years of experience. Sometimes the answer to other things is "I don't know" but, every time I didn't know something and I have to help a student I always follow it up with "but let's dick around with this a bit and I'm sure we can get it working" > As for source control and automated testing--congratulations, you are now Mr. IT-guy for 30 people for the next 14 weeks. And students can be really creative in wedging their repositories. To this day, I still have no idea how one student managed to create a recursive repository in Subversion. You really have to be committed to accept the cost of the things I recommended. If a student is paying 15-30k a year and I'm making 8.50$/hr to help them I have absolutely no problem helping them. They are quite literally paying my salary. I've answered emails at 2am before an exam, met up with students on weekends before exams, and spent hours with students to help them "get it". School should be about getting taught the material you need to succeed. It should be our goal to achieve that even if it's a little hard. And again, I don't think that student is going to be making a recursive svn directory in front of their boss after you helped them out of that ditch and it's a good thing you did.
  - bsder 10y ago
    Agree with all of your points. I'm simply pointing out that all of these things take time away from my primary mission which is to teach my material. I need to teach the material as it generally is a building block for what comes later. If I don't get the material across, I've done a bad job as well. If I teach Data Structures, the students need to know that when they come out of my class or they will fail the next classes. (I had to reteach Data Structures to a class that had a bad teacher once before I could teach my material). And, I applaud your dedication as a TA. People have zero idea how much effort goes into actually teaching a class. As the instructor, teaching a 14-week, 2 2 hour lectures per week class is a greater than 40 hour/week job including planning, constructing projects, running the infrastructure, answering questions, office hours, and grading exams. That is, sadly, why I don't teach much anymore. I would earn more hourly by working at McDonalds than I do if I lecture at a university. :(

bsder 10y ago

> I've been pushing the head of the class I help TA for to make it mandatory that students use PyCharm. He's still afraid that PyCharm will intimidate the users but I think it's well worth it. Dropping an IDE and automated testing into your class is not without cost. 10% of the questions the rest of the semester will be how to do something in the IDE. And, occasionally, you're not going to know the answer. Saying "I don't know" can be intimidating to someone who doesn't have 20+ years of experience. As for source control and automated testing--congratulations, you are now Mr. IT-guy for 30 people for the next 14 weeks. And students can be really creative in wedging their repositories. To this day, I still have no idea how one student managed to create a recursive repository in Subversion. You really have to be committed to accept the cost of the things I recommended.

sotojuan 10y ago
Heh, way more than 10% of my CS classes' questions were how to do stuff in Emacs (what my professor said we should use). I used to just use Sublime and `scp` the files back to the school server.
- bsder 10y ago
  That's unsurprising. I would never use vi or emacs for beginners. However, I also didn't care what my students used. I taught Eclipse. One of my students said: "Is using Netbeans okay?" "Okay? That fact that you have a conception about IDE's makes me ecstatic. Absolutely, you can feel free to use whatever you choose. Just know that I can't answer questions about your IDE, so you are on your own for that." For my very senior class, I set things up so that they could actually use any of the JVM languages rather than just straight Java (Using Groovy, Jython, JRuby, etc. would have made their programs SOOOOOOO much smaller and easier). Disappointingly, nobody took advantage of it.
  - vorg 10y ago
    > Using Groovy, Jython, JRuby, etc Hope you included Scala, Clojure, and Kotlin in that list, all of which are more suitable than any of those three. Jython's been around since 1997-ish but isn't used much, nor is JRuby. As for Groovy, I recently looked into its apparent popularity at #17 on the TIOBE ranking and found Baidu was giving a result 12 times too high and Yahoo a result 20 times too high, both of which would skew the ranking. Groovy's real ranking is somewhere below that of #50 ranked Clojure.
    - bsder 10y ago
      I would have taken ANY JVM language at the time. ANy language with hash tables and tuples that wasn't so verbose would have been a vast improvement. Groovy gets a boost because of Gradle which is now the default build system for Android Studio. That's going to artificially inflate its position.
gravypod 10y ago
> 10% of the questions the rest of the semester will be how to do something in the IDE. And, occasionally, you're not going to know the answer. Most of the things they will need to do will be laid out for them before hand. I also have nothing against them asking me more questions. I'm technically paid by the question and it's better for them to ask these questions in an environment that is as conducive to learning as a classroom instead of needing to ask a boss/coworker on the first day of class. > Saying "I don't know" can be intimidating to someone who doesn't have 20+ years of experience. Sometimes the answer to other things is "I don't know" but, every time I didn't know something and I have to help a student I always follow it up with "but let's dick around with this a bit and I'm sure we can get it working" > As for source control and automated testing--congratulations, you are now Mr. IT-guy for 30 people for the next 14 weeks. And students can be really creative in wedging their repositories. To this day, I still have no idea how one student managed to create a recursive repository in Subversion. You really have to be committed to accept the cost of the things I recommended. If a student is paying 15-30k a year and I'm making 8.50$/hr to help them I have absolutely no problem helping them. They are quite literally paying my salary. I've answered emails at 2am before an exam, met up with students on weekends before exams, and spent hours with students to help them "get it". School should be about getting taught the material you need to succeed. It should be our goal to achieve that even if it's a little hard. And again, I don't think that student is going to be making a recursive svn directory in front of their boss after you helped them out of that ditch and it's a good thing you did.
- bsder 10y ago
  Agree with all of your points. I'm simply pointing out that all of these things take time away from my primary mission which is to teach my material. I need to teach the material as it generally is a building block for what comes later. If I don't get the material across, I've done a bad job as well. If I teach Data Structures, the students need to know that when they come out of my class or they will fail the next classes. (I had to reteach Data Structures to a class that had a bad teacher once before I could teach my material). And, I applaud your dedication as a TA. People have zero idea how much effort goes into actually teaching a class. As the instructor, teaching a 14-week, 2 2 hour lectures per week class is a greater than 40 hour/week job including planning, constructing projects, running the infrastructure, answering questions, office hours, and grading exams. That is, sadly, why I don't teach much anymore. I would earn more hourly by working at McDonalds than I do if I lecture at a university. :(