Student Comments From UTM Problem Solving Sessions

• Honestly, those sessions are the best hours I've spent in my university life. I am a 5th year student here at UTM, and I've found these sessions extremely useful.

  Although what you mention in these sessions is common sense, you don't actually realize it until someone tells you. I am the type of person where I excel at something once I am exposed to the why of how something works. This is something that lacks in the university teaching experience. You get the problem posed to you, and you get a quick answer in lecture. For example, you're in a linear algebra lecture, and the prof is introducing the concept of matrix multiplication. The professor poses the problem on the blackboard. He then goes on by telling you that the answer is some number x plus some number y plus some other number z, which gives you the answer of c. Great, you got the answer to that particular problem, but how will you know what to do when posed a similar problem? How about a more complicated problem involving the concept you just learned? The student is lost and the textbook doesn't help either as it solves the problems in a similar fashion. The student therefore loses interest and struggles in the course, and doesn't get the mark that they are capable of, simply because they are not taught properly. Some factors that can figure into something like this happening could be:

  1. Professors usually have about an hour (maybe two or three, depending on the length of the lecture) to cover a certain amount of material, so a lot of time cannot be spent on a particular topic, much like the time in 343 when people were having problems with the select statement and whether a certain row would have been included in the answer. Because of this lack of time, they show condensed solutions in class, leaving it up to the student to figure it out.
  2. Some professors simply are not good at conveying the knowledge they have to the student. Sure professors are pretty intelligent, or else they wouldn't have the qualifications to teach the course. But intelligence is NOT equivalent to excellence in teaching.
  Though these are just flaws in the system, but just like in real life, nothing's perfect, so you just have to adapt yourself to how the routine is carried out. In the working world, you won't have everyone catering to you as you'd like, so you have to learn to deal with it, just as is evident in the university experience.

  But what is unfortunate is that you have to make this adaptation in a learning environment. This may prove detrimental to a student abilaity to excel to their potential, which is unfair.

  But I find that this problem solving session that Professor Rosenbloom is holding here is a superb way to bridge the gap between the knowledge gained in the classroom, and knowledge of the concepts being taught.

  I found it EXTREMELY useful to follow the practices taught in the first session while attempting to complete my CSC343 assignment 1. Using the guidelines he outlined during the session, I was able to complete an assignment that was giving some people problems with relative ease. I was not without my problems of course, as I pestered Professor Rosenbloom with questions. But as learned in the first session, these problems allow you to understand more about the problem at hand, and they make the solution become ever more clear. Once I had the sufficient knowledge to understand the problem fully, I was able to draft a solution. Fortunately for myself, all the code i wrote, except for one method, worked to perfection the first time I had implemented them on computer. All because I had thought about the problem on paper first and could say that "I understand" the problem at hand and was ready to solve it.

  I definitely recommed attending these problem solving sessions if you can make time for it, they are wonderful and give you a lot of insight into what it takes to solve real world problems. I like this session so much that I beleive that this should be made into a first year computer science course. (maybe that's a little optimistic, but it's something for you to consider) Also if it is made into a course, it should be required for any CS program, as the skills learned here are invaluable in a CS student's "toolbox".

  thanx very much for coming up with this idea, it was GREAT!

• I've taken several of your courses now (108, 350, 343) and have enjoyed your teaching immensely. The way you teach through examples and process while explaining the theory behind something is effective and promotes attention. My friends wanted to attend the sessions you held on problem solving last semester and I reluctantly joined them. "I already know what he's gonna say.", "It's just wishy-washy, no-fact garbage.", "How is it going to help me.", "Can't we just go eat lunch?". Turns out, I was wrong! Perhaps I did know some of what you said, because I've often though about the same things in the back of my mind but, as a result of the sessions I was given the opportunity to bring those thoughts forward and think about them and hear some other interpretations of the problem solving process. The sessions did help and I now make a conscious effort to adhere to, or at least recall the process of problem solving and follow it through more directly. Where I used to give up I now sit down and figure out what information I know and then what information I need to know then how to get the information and where to get it from, and from there it's easy to proceed to a complete solution. So, thanks for running the seminars (and, indeed the lectures in general) the way you do and I look forward to 309 and the technology sessions in the upcoming semester.
• A CSC student teaching calculus to OAC students...

  i applied what i learned in your problem solving sessions to help them with the questions they had(because i had to reacquire the basic principles to understand the problems they were posing to me). This was good as they saw the process i use to solve the problems and i hope they learned from it.

  I kept stressing that they understand the process i was going through. I even made some deliberate mistakes and they caught on to every one, so their minds were really into it.

• Like you said you get more confident as you go on and learn and solve problems by yourself, I learned that I am able to teach myself and get more confidence when confronting diffucult problems in the future.

  These days I help out a few friends of mine with their java assignments and try to tell them the same thing you've always taught us, that is do something simple first and see that it works and then build form that.

• After the session that we had on Friday, me and urooj said that university should have some kind of a course before taking courses like mat 102, csc 238 and csc 364, that should just teach us the fundamental steps of solving problems. Like I attended one of the problem solving seminars that you did last semester, and after that I said "if I could have attended that seminar in my first year, i would have been a better computer science student".

  Yah so you know you should definetly have some more seminars like that, and make it compulsory for all the first year computer science students. Stuff like that is not taught to students in High School, thats why they have a hard time in university.

• I found the session extremely helpful. I am definitely looking at problems differently now. I am now better equipped with tools to be able to solve ... any problems. I think its very important to have a certain mind set before tackling such problems and your session helped me get into that mind set. Something like this would have definitely helped me alot if I had experienced it back in first year.
• Just writing to thank you for your time when you explained me about problem solving approaches. I have been noticing that it has been very helpful, each time I am trying to solve a problem whether it be one of the assignments from CSC378 or just a problem to brush up my problem solving skills, I am doing a lot better than I used to.

  I especially like the two points, Understand the problem. Simplify it, and when you will get to the solution it willbe very simple.