Grading

On 01.20.09, In computer science, school, By Dan

As it’s my first semester T.A.’ing, it’s also my first semester grading. I picked up the first homework from Prof. Qiu this morning, and I just got done grading it. There are about 40-45 kids and it took about 3 hours. So, 4-5 minutes per homework – I can live with that.

Tonight was also the first time that a student in the class scheduled an appointment to get help with her homework. I hadn’t looked at the upcoming homework as they just finished the first assignment, but I was very pleased when I was able to jump right in and know exactly the problem. It’s a great feeling to know the entirety of a class without needing a refresher, and being able to take any section and just go.

In short, so far so good.

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Graphing

On 12.14.08, In computer science, By Dan

For Scientific Computing, I decided I wanted to have a grapher with which I could programmatically interface easily. Of course, there are options other there, from gnuPlot to you-name-it, but I figured that it wouldn’t be too hard to write one myself. Especially since there’s a ruby port for OpenGL.

Long story short, I’ve got something that’s not too terrible. Not perfect, but it’s certainly a start:

A few functions plotted with my grapher

A few functions plotted with my grapher

But then, I thought, “why stop there?” I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to make a 3D version. While the 2D one will work on any generic function you give it, this 3D one has it hard-coded in right now. Of course, it wouldn’t be too much more to make it more flexible, but given that this took 30 minutes, I’m ok with its rigidity.

A simple surface.

A simple surface.

We’ll see where this goes. It makes me feel a little nerdy that I’m two days into my winter break, and this is how I’ve spent some of it.

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Scientific Computing

On 11.30.08, In computer science, school, By Dan

A couple of weeks ago now, I spoke to a professor about the possibility of T.A.’ing next semester’s CSCI407 – Scientific Computing. It was one of my favorite classes at Mines, and I’m really looking forward to it. The professor will not be on campus from March onward, and so it will be an online class from that point, but I’ll likely be holding regular class hours during that time. Exciting!

This is all because one of my few regrets about KAUST is that I wouldn’t get a chance to T.A. or teach there as a student, so, I’m pursuing that here.

So, if you’ve still got Sci. Comp. left to take, take it next semester. I hear they’re going to have a sweet T.A.!

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Scientific Computing

On 05.08.08, In computer science, school, By Dan

Two days ago I finished my final for Scientific Computing (it was a take-home final), and was somewhat sad to see the end of it. Sure, it was a lot of work (too much, according to Matt Matteson) – I spent literally upwards of a hundred hours this semester working on the homework and exams. I recently tallied up the number of pages I submitted, and it was upwards of a 135 8.5 x 11 pages, most of it marked up in LaTeX. (Because of this class my LaTeX-fu has grown significantly stronger.)

I look forward to any more classes I have with this prof.

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