Jean-Noël Rivasseau

Teaching Responsabilities at UBC

I had a TA (Teaching Assistantship) responsability at the Computer Science Department of UBC, which provided me some funding for the 2003-2004 year. I have been a TA 3 times, for two different courses.

On 2003-2004 Winter term 1, and again on Winter term 2, I have been a TA for Harinder Singh Khangura CPSC 100 course ( Elements of Computer Science ).

This course is at a very introductory level and isn't, in fact, intended for people willing to graduate with a CS major. Basically, it teaches students how to use the main major (Microsoft, unfortunately) office applications on Windows. And on the last labs, the students get to do some programming, using, gasp, Visual Basic...

Nothing very exciting for a computer geek or at least a graduate CS student! But, the good thing was that this course didn't require a lot of effort to prepare, so I got more free time to do some cool stuff.

During the 2004 summer term, I helped teaching TA for CPSC 111 ( Introduction to Computation ) with Paul Carter .

I liked this course better. It was still an introductory course, but it focused on teaching Object Oriented Programming concepts with Java. In this course there was some real programming tasks, albeit most of the code had already been prepared in advance. For me, it was also useful since I didn't know Java much before.