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A word of advice: writing code on whiteboards is hard. Practice! Yes. If you are able, try to get some experience teaching. If you do it well, it will give you
by iamcurious 11y ago
A word of advice: writing code on whiteboards is hard. Practice!
Yes. If you are able, try to get some experience teaching. If you do it well, it will give you plenty of experience writing code while discussing its relative merits. Hell, spend enough time with academics and you will get in the habit of writing code on paper first and only typing it later as an after thought.
And wait till you get one know-it-all student! They act like sufficiently smart compilers, correcting both syntax and semantics. They will make sure you follow what you teach!
All this sounds hard, but the curve doesn't have to be more steep than you want it to. The world is full of programmers who could use a few minutes of your time to understand that pesky algorithm that you know backward and forward.
- qmalxp 11y agoI totally agree. IMO it doesn't even have to be a CS course; my experience TAing calculus helped immensely with whiteboard interviews. I think it's the process of pacing yourself through the problem. If I see some fancy integral, I might be able to solve it in one or two lines. But if I want the students to understand, I'm not allowed to skip steps so it'll take more like 15 lines, and I'll have to verbally explain each line as I write it. It's getting used to switching back and forth between dictation and logical process.