Computer Science 101 Intro to Computing I
Spring 2016

How to Study Computer Science

How to Study Computer Science

A primer for COSC 101 at Colgate University

John Stratton


Introduction

Whether you are an ambitious student reading this before the term starts, a dutiful student reading this after your instructor told you to, or a stressed student trying to figure out how to get yourself unstuck from what feels like a mental block, welcome to this guide! This guide was written for you, condensing some of the practical advice that has come out of many hours of conversations with students in my office.

Computer Science is... unusual. Think about other fields in the natural sciences. In high school, almost every student intending to major in physics had several high-school physics classes. Same for chemistry, biology, and math. Majors like neuroscience are a bit different, but basic science courses like chemistry and biology are still pretty good preparation. This is true beyond the natural sciences as well. In many fields, adequate preparation in critical reading, analytical writing, and common high-school subjects smooth the transition into courses on humanities and social sciences.

It is unfortunate that, in the United States, despite Computer Science being an increasingly important field to our culture and economy, very few high-school students have access to high-quality introductory computer science courses. When you arrive in COSC 101, you will have two big challenges - learning a second language, the language of algorithms and specifically the Python dialect. On top of that, you will have to learn problem-solving skills that are more about learning creativity and design than learning facts. That's a big challenge, and the strategies you may have developed to learn other materials may not work out as well in this class.

This primer is an attempt to not leave you alone in figuring out how to learn what we're trying to teach you. With homework and labs, you will get quick and good feedback about the artifacts of your effort. What you might not get feedback on as easily are the habits and methods you used to do your work, because we can't see that as easily to give that feedback. Your lab instructors will try, but it's hard to see everything in a class of 14-16, especially when many of the things we'd like to give feedback on are what happens when you're specifically not talking with us or asking questions.

Every person is unique, and much of what is in this manual might not apply to you. However, if you feel like you are struggling, putting in a huge amount of time for what seems like a relatively small amount of progress, or you just want to get more out of this course, there is a good chance that in some of these sections, you'll see a mirror image of yourself. And that's because for almost every challenge you have faced, your predecessors have also faced that challenge, they talked with me about them, and I had some advice that I hope was useful to them, and will be useful to you now.

Welcome to the wonderful world of CS 101. Here are my best tips and tricks for passing like a superstar.

Types of Mastery

I'm sorry. One class isn't going to make you an expert programmer. Actually, I'm not really sorry - the fact that you can't become an expert programmer in one class means that all of my former students have reasonably secure jobs. However, you don't have to be an expert programmer to be able to write some pretty powerful programs and solve a lot of problems, just as you don't need to be an expert carpenter to be pretty good at DIY home repairs. However, you will need some tools and the knowledge of how to use them, and that's what this course is about.

When people are gaining new knowledge, educators sometimes talk about "levels of mastery", where students start out with no mastery, and gradually become more and more familiar with the material. The ultimate goal is deeply understanding a new idea well enough that you can see a new situation and make good, informed decisions on how that idea might apply to the new situation, comparing it with many other ideas and making good choices about which ideas is most valuable in describing or solving that situation. Several scholars have even proposed formal taxonomies and stages of learning. But you're not an educational psycologist, and I'm not convinced that you will experience a linear progression among the different sub-skills that go into being able to write programs. So we're just going to focus on what you're likely to experience in the lab and homework assignments.

"What does this even mean?"

When you're first shown new ideas or new approaches, you'll have the opportunity to just try them out. It's new, so just by looking at a piece of code, you're not going to know what it does or why. Even if you've been shown exactly what you would need to know to understand what it does and why, you won't have digested it yet, and that's fine. Your goal, when starting out with new material, is to play with it. Take the examples from lab, type some stuff, and use the interpreter to see what it does.

"I understand what this does"

After you have learned the basic concepts for a certain programming tool, the best thing you can do is look at examples of how the tool can be used. The solutions to lecture examples and your own solutions to lab and homework assignments are all examples you can learn from, and will help your mind recall patterns. Then, when you see a new problem, you are more likely to be able to recall a similar problem you saw before, and the similar solution that went with it.

"I have an idea of how to solve this, but I'm not sure"

In this course, you will often be asked to practice new skills though being given problems that require you to use those skills to solve. Sometimes, you will be able to remember and see the connections between examples you have already seen and the solutions that went with them. Even if you don't, remember that the problems you are given are not random. Even if the assignment doesn't spell it out or look familiar, you should always be thinking along the lines of "how can what we just learned in class be used to solve this problem?" You might not know right away, but the important thing is to try something. You will probably get it wrong several times before you get it right, but that's okay. The worst thing that can happen to you when you get a new problem is to try nothing because you are not convinced that what you're thinking of will work. Many students get their first working solutions not by knowing exactly what to do, but by writing something, anything, and then fiddling with it until it works.

The most common place that I have seen students get caught is here, because not knowing exactly what to do, writing something, and fiddling with it until it works is a reasonable strategy for completing the assignment successfully and getting a good grade on that assignment. But beware, it can be a trap if you think that because you got working code in the end you have learned everything you needed to. Fiddling with code without understanding it may get you through labs, and even some of the homework assignments, but will fail you on the exams where you don't have an interpreter to help you fiddle with your code. Also, even for homework assignments, code-fiddling is a very inefficient way of getting things done. The course builds on itself, so while it might be okay to spend an hour or two fiddling with the one loop in an early homework assignment, later assignments will include many loops. So, you will need to learn to master each topic well enough that, eventually, you can apply it in a solution quickly. That is what the later sections will help you do.

"I know what this should do"

Now that you know the rules of algorithms and Python in general, you should be able to beat the interpreter. The interpreter isn't generally wrong, but if you're always asking the interpreter to tell you what your code is doing, you're missing a step. Once you feel like you "understand" a concept or an idea, take an example piece of code and try to predict what will happen when the interpreter runs. Where do these examples come from? Well, there will be some in lecture, but those are probably a bit early for you to really get the most out of them. The best examples are your own works-in-progress, when you have some code written for an assignment, you're pretty sure it's not finished, but who cares? Stop yourself before you run the interpreter to see if you can predict what will happen when the interpreter runs. If your prediction is wrong, can you see what you read or thought incorrectly? Keep trying, until you can more often than not successfully predict what a piece of code will do when the interpreter takes it.

The reason many students do not practice this way is because, at first, it is slower than just asking the interpreter what your code does. But there are two reasons why this practice is important. First, every exam will start with several problems like this, where you have to read a piece of code and report what will happen when it runs. Second, it will force you to understand the code more deeply than you did before. When you look at examples of working solutions, you already know what the program does, which leads many people to not pay as close attention to every detail of how it works.

This practice will not come naturally to you, but will reveal gaps in your understanding you may not have noticed otherwise, and will greatly increase your understanding and success on the relevant sections of the exams.

"If I change this..."

Now that you can read a piece of code and understand what it does, now start thinking about variations. What would happen if you changed one part or another? This level of knowledge and kind of exercise is very similar to those in the previous section, but begins to put your improved understanding of how code works to practical use.

There are two ways to predict the effect of a change. One is to make the change, and then reanalyze the new code fresh to see what it does. But this is inefficient, and by going through this practice you will naturally start to develop the second method, which is to understand the original code well enough that you understand the role and effect of the thing you plan to change. If you understand how that part fits into the whole, you can quickly narrow down to the precise differences in the code's behavior based on the change, quickly screening out everything else that is unchanged in both the code text and the code's behavior. This is a much deeper level of understanding that will also help you write new code much more quickly and correctly, both in future homework assignments and on exams.

"I can fix this"

Many students spend the vast majority of their homework time debugging. The ultimate goal of the previous steps is to help you come up with solutions more quickly that are less likely to have bugs in the first place. Bugs still happen, though, to everybody, and the same skills that help you avoid bugs in the first place will help you find and correct them. By understanding how the various pieces of your program work and interact together, you will be more able to identify what part of the code is most likely responsible for a particular error. That same understanding will then help you reexamine that piece of code to identify what it might be doing incorrectly, and the exact change needed to correct the mistake.

Getting Help

If you read through the previous chapter, it should be clear to you that, at the beginning of learning a new concept, there will be a lot that you cannot do for yourself. At first, debugging, understanding of the different pieces, and even just knowing what a bit of code actually does will be beyond you, and yet you have an assignment that requires those skills to get through it. This is why the course is extremely well supported with around a 5:1 student to lab tutor ratio in each lab section, supervised open lab hours with available tutors, and faculty office hours. We even encourage students to work together with other students in the class to discuss how to solve problems and help each other debug. (Please always type your own solution from scratch, though, if you happen to be working with others.)

There are many other people to help you and answer questions. However, it is your responsibility to use those resources wisely, so that you and all your classmates get the most out of them.

Try to figure it out yourself first

Remember that the point of the assignments are for you to learn, not to get the right answer the easiest way possible. If you get stuck on something, try working at it yourself for just a few minutes and see if you get anywhere. Some students are quick to ask for help because it saves them time, and they feel like they understand the solution when someone else shows it to them. There is nothing wrong with this, but if all your hard problems are solved this way, one of two things may happen. You might not be learning things as well as you thought, and will find that when the supports are taken away for the exam, you won't be able to perform as well as you did on the homework and lab assignments. Or you may indeed be learning well, but lack confidence because you haven't proven to yourself that you could have gotten it on your own if you tried harder.

Whenever you run into a problem, try it yourself for a little while first, or work with someone that also doesn't immediately get it yet. If you solve it yourself, you will feel much more satisfied than you would if you had someone else just explain it to you.

Don't waste your time by refusing help

On the other side, some people learn the previous lesson "too well", and think that they have to figure out everything themselves to learn the most. Remember back to the introduction to this section, when you are just starting out, there are challenges that will likely be beyond your ability to solve at first. If you try to solve a problem you're not at least on the cusp of grasping yourself, you will spend a large amount of time on it for little to no progress. Even if you do solve the problem eventually, chances are you won't learn as much from it as you would hope, because the solution doesn't make complete sense to you.

The people that refuse to get help often do learn well eventually, but I believe that the learning process is shortened when you can have someone get you unstuck. A good rule of thumb is that if you've spent a certain amount of time on a problem, and feel like you haven't gotten anywhere, it will probably take you that much time again to finally solve it yourself. Ask yourself if it's worth it. In lab, 5-10 minutes of being stuck is usually good enough to call in a ringer. On homework, maybe you spend 20-30 minutes on a particular issue before going in to office hours or open lab.

Be respectful of everyone's time

Despite the large amount of support we have in this course, we can't accommodate everybody doing their homework in office hours or open lab where help is on call. The main reason we want people to start assignments early is not because we expect it will take you forever, but because we want you to have many opportunities to get stuck on your own, come to office hours or open lab, and get yourself unstuck again. That's the mindset you should have as you work on the homework assignments, because it will help use everyone's time best.

You avoid wasting time, because if you ever get stuck and are about to waste a bunch of time, you can just stop and shelve your work until the next open lab or office hours. The instructors and tutors have their time used well, by being able to spend the most time on the most important part - getting people unstuck from the hardest problems. This lets us help more people, improving the learning experience for everyone.

Parting Words

Hopefully you found this guide helpful and encouraging. Whether or not you did, remember that this guide is not intended to be a substitute for talking with your instructor. If you have questions, concerns, or just want to tell us how things are going in the class for you, our email accounts and office hours are open for all those reasons in addition to immediate homework help. Even if you just try out some of the suggestions here and found them helpful, I personally would be glad to know.

We are your learning coaches, and are glad to work with you to make sure you are learning as much and as efficiently as possible, and that you get a good grade to show for it. This collection of advice is just one part of that, and I hope you found it useful.