UIT2201: Tutorial 1, Week 1

T1 (Week 1), 15-Jan, 2010

Tutorial 1 for UIT2201 is always an interesting experiment for me as it is always difficult to predict the reaction of the students to the unexpected questions that they see being asked and discussed. However, I must say that it went very well indeed! And I must thank all the students for doing that part and going with me on the journey to put on an "IT-thinking" or "computational thinking" hat during the tutorial with me. I threw a question at them, "How many ways are there to find out how many people there are in this room? in this lecture theatre? or in general, in any big groups of people? We went on to talk about divide and conquer (good ways to do it and also bad way to do it) and other creative solutions. (This reminded me of an old writeup about a similar problem. I will find it and post a link later.)

We had interesting discussions on "how to give instructions" (and the many different ways in which to give them as witnessed from the students' contributions) and upon further exploration, it became more obvious that it was not an easy task at all to give "precise and concise instructions". [After classes, I just though of the term "universally executable instructions".] We also explored the question of what level of abstraction should be adopted, discussed divide-and-conquer in this context -- breaking the instructions into big chunks, and giving further details as necessary. We then found similar issues when tackling T1-D3 (automating a process), for many different processes.

Also, one student (was it YingDan?) wanted to try out the 9-ring puzzle, so I will "reset" it and pass it to her next week. Also, I was in a hurry to go to the next appointment. Overall, I was happy with tutorial 1, I hope everyone enjoyed it and learned something too.