Lecture 6

Lecture 6,

Peer-led Debugging Session

Lesson plan

What are we practicing?

Being welcoming, encouraging, and mindful of your tone and body language
Giving students the appropriate level of help
Helping students pick up cool debugging strategies
Use of visualizations, explanations and other techniques when appropriate
Managing your time (rule of thumb is to keep your interaction under 10 minutes, although depends on the context)

Structure of the session

Prior to the class we invite all tutors to submit the hardest questions they were asked so far related to concepts and code. Students submit buggy student-code prior to the class on Gradescope.

In class we’ll have mini mock tutoring sessions. At the end of each session, all participants write short reflections and the experienced tutors provide helpful feedback

About the activity (5 to 10 minutes per student)

Students will form groups of 4.
One person assumes the role of a student, another that of a tutor. The others in the group (including the lead tutors / instructors) are observers.
The 190J tutor who submitted their version of buggy code will play the role of a student seeking assistance. Another 190J tutor will play the role of the tutor (unaware of what the bug is) and assist the “student” through their problem.
The “student” should ask the tutor a question related to the code. The tutor should appropriately engage with the student to help them solve the problem.
Each interaction should nominally take 10 minutes. If the interaction ends in less than 5 minutes, the student should proceed to ask a second question.
Complete the reflections and feedback described below.
Switch roles and repeat.

Reflections and feedback (5 minutes per student)

After each tutoring session, all the observers (including the lead tutor) should fill this form about the interaction peer-review observation form
The student who assumed the role of a “tutor” should fill this reflection form: 190J-tutor reflection form
The lead tutors go over the feedback in the observation form and summarize the feedback for the tutors.