LIU (ZUGUANG LIU)

Engineering Models is a mandatory freshman class for all engineering students at UC. It aims to train students' basic IT and programming skills by teaching them basic engineering uses of MATLAB and Excel. Around the two software, there are lectures teaching students fundamentals (for example, I/O statement, for/while loops, conditional statements, etc.) Students will finish a small project during each recitation session, where they encounter topics of different background (mechanical, chemical, electrical, etc.) and uses their learned skills to solve practical problems in a programming perspective. This is usually called “lab” as well.

 

As one of the TA for the class, my main responsibility is to answer students’ questions, gives them hints, and check answers for their lab projects. I also did more work than normal TA because I used this as an Honors experience.

 

Through the 13-week lab sessions, I not only gained experience of instructing others with their programming instead of writing the code myself, but also practiced some teaching philosophy and methodology offered by Niki (Caroline Harrison), who is the student-wise supervisor for this pre-approved honors experience. Another thing that the experience made me realize is that different people write programs differently. This idea helps me to open myself to read others’ code as well as gives me the patience to help them debug their code, instead of telling people “your code does not work use mine.” They are important professional skills too especially when I need to work other co-workers during Co-op.

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At the end of the semester, a final project required for Honors experience is to design a lab/homework that can be used to introduce a new concept or improve the existing content. My project is a lab whose topic is “Decimal to Binary Converter”.

 

In terms of technical skills, the lab helps students practice using I/O statements, conditional statement and loops, as well as beware students of the difference between strings and numbers in programming. In terms of the content, the lab teaches students how the binary number system, which is used in computers, can be easily transformed to decimal number system, which human is familiar with. Students will also understand how powerful the binary number system is, with the enhancement given by ingenious engineering design (such as the signed binary system).

 

With the teaching process learned from Niki, I understood that new information needs to be given step by step rather than as a chunk. Therefore, I took it apart to three sections, Part A, B and C. Thus, students are able to understand the concept by fully practicing it inside each section, so that they are ready for another new piece of information in the next section. Figure 1 is how the desire program looks like when executing. Figure 2 and 3 demonstrate the lab is broken into three parts.

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For those who are interested in the actual code, it is available in the git hub repository below.