Teaching: week 1

You know, originally I came here to teach English for 8-12 year old children. As they read my CV, they asked me if I can teach some programming to university students. I am more familiar with people in my age or teenagers and I am more familiar with programming than English grammar. What I maybe missed it's not only the question of my knowledge in the field, but the method of teaching itself.

I had some previous teaching experience as taking a Javascript course in the Szent István High School, with another programmer together, where we created a platformer game. I helped at C++ teaching at the university, but it was just correcting homeworks, exams, I held only one lesson. Most of the time I just helped to my classmates. Ohh! One more: I tutored two guys in C++ :)
So I was engaged in teaching before, but had just little experience in it and always just did what I felt good.

So on my first week here as I teach Javascript and networking I thought it'll be fine, I know a lot of things about these themes :)
Maybe I was a bit confused what they mean under networking, but I thought It'll be fine to teach how the internet works and how the webpages are loaded to our browser.
So I was like: Let's do it!

You can read about how I teach at the end of the post, but you can skip it, maybe it's not so interesting if you are not familiar with these themes.

To sum up:
I think I was too fast and wanted to show them too many things. They learned a lot from it, some students more, some less. It was not good to teach only for one week, after it, I should've make some tests and fix the themes which were less understood.

About the relation with the students:
The students were really friendly, sadly there were only 4 of them, and some days even less. Luckily, on the next weeks they were more :)
The students were really friendly and open. Some times in the break we ate together some "breakfast" (they call every small dish with is not dinner or launch) and played some football. They asked a lot about Hungary and told a lot about Nepal :) So the Cultural exchange goal of the Aiesec program was achieved.

One last thing:
The lessons were a bit ad-hoc, when they start, who comes, who don't. The students were just really natural, when they were hungry they were gone to eat and the lesson was shifted, when I held a break they come back as they ended their other stuffs. When the previous lesson was longer, then we shifted our. As a first impression it seemed not good, but it's less stressful and rigid. I easily got used to it. :)


About Javascript teaching:
I started to tell them some things about Javascript engines, like V8, some things about script languages, weak types and so. It was good, but they could not follow me so fast. I was forced to take it slower and show how a webpage is built up from html elements and what the DOM is. They were familiar with these, but not used to handle them. So I just made some exercises to how the Javascript code is executed (when and in which order) and how it's interacting with the html page through events and DOM modification. It was better to teach them this way, with easy examples like changing the text of a button when it's clicked. They learned some things, but I sadly I had just one week, after the first week I started to teach Java and Python and had no more time for Javascript. I think it was worthy, they understand things better and are able to write basic codes.


About Networking teaching:
Firstly I tried to measure their knowledge, what they know and what not. They had basic understandings, mostly they were just familiar with the technologies related to networking. So I tried to build up the teaching material from the basics. I showed them the classic ISO-OSI layer model and tried to show them real-life examples how the communication link is built up when the browser running on the phone fetches a webpage. Electromagnetic Waves, WiFi connection, MAC addresses, IP packets, TCP connection, HTTP GET, HTML code, and so. Not very detailed, just to have some feeling about which layer is what for. On the next lesson I showed how the layers are working through packets, which part of the packet responsible for what. On the last lessons we analyzed some real-life packets, with Wireshark and HTTP communication with Chrome.
Ohh yes, one more! On a lesson I detailed how the global internet is connected through autonomous systems. I love and know this really, because I'm writing my thesis about this theme, but they said at the end of the lesson, that it's not really useful for them to know all these details x)