How far should I help students with learning extracurricular skills?

Question

I am currently a teaching assistant for both master and PhD students. Part of my work included helping and supervising them during several lab experiments (physics). One task of the lab experiments is to write a program to numerically calculate values and simulate them afterwards. The students are allowed to use any programming language they want to use (except stuff like Brainfuck and Whitespace, of course), as long as they provide the source code with the result.
While the master students are not having any problems with the problem, I got was asked by the PhD students if I can help them do the programming in Excel, as that is the only thing they can use and know for "programming".

How far should I now go and help them? I know that doing the task they are assigned to is impossible to do in Excel, but they never used any other language or programmed themselves. I am able to teach them how to achieve the programming goal, but based on their current knowledge that will take a lot of time, which I also need for my own lab tasks. Should I thus simply tell them to drop the course, or should I try to help them, and if yes, in which extent?

Answer 1

If you are a TA and have questions about what to do, almost always the first thing you should do is ask the instructor. The instructor should clarify exactly how you should be assisting them, and what the prerequisites for the course are. I would be wary, as a TA, of suggesting students to drop the class.

Answer 2

This is definitely an issue for the instructor.

Perhaps programming should have been mentioned as a prerequisite for the course. On the other hand, the prerequisites probably did not list "Must be able to find the physics lab given a campus map.", even if that is required for success on the course. The instructor may have, not unreasonably, assumed that graduate students in a STEM subject can do simple numerical programming in at least one language.

You may want to have a list of options to present to the instructor:

• If the assignment can actually be done using a spreadsheet, show you how so you can help the students do so.
• Set an alternative assignment.
• Pick a time period when you would normally be doing TA activities, and tell the students who cannot program to meet you then. Teach them really, really basic programming in some language with which you are familiar.

Answer 3

How far should I now go and help them?

You probably shouldn't be spending any time whatsoever teaching prerequisite skills one-on-one to any individual students. As you say, it is not anywhere in your expected priority queue of work that the university expects you to be doing (plus: it's simply an inefficient use of the time resource). Perhaps the most that is reasonable is to point the student in question to a relevant class, book, or tutorial from which they can learn on their own (and as an aside, to explain why it's a bad idea to use Excel for a task like this).

That said, you note in a comment that "As far as I know there were no requisites stated beforehand". This is, indeed, very bad. I would say if that's the case that the instructor may now have a responsibility to give them an alternative and equivalent assignment that does not involve programming, if that failed to be stated up front in university prerequisites, or on the first-day syllabus information.

Definitely speak with the teacher of the class (and advisor if that's a different person), tell them there are students in the class who don't know any programming, and ask about how to handle this case.

Answer 4

Personally, my go to is to provide as many resources that are available to them, and then it is their prerogative to take advantage of what I have provided to them. There are a number of excellent resources for students to learn how to code and program in all the languages available online, and for free! I've have used both the free options, and they give practical and immediate feedback on their progress.

Being a TA takes a lot of time, and it being a post-secondary education course these students should be responsible enough to seek help and use the resources available to them. You could put a task from these sites as a lab, or do quizzes based on the activities in each module on the sites below.

If you are looking for free options I would recommend:

1. Free Code Camp
2. Code Academy

A paid option is Udemy

Free Code Camp is a collection of many resources from all over the Internet. It has 300 hours of total practice available, all split by the different programming languages.

Code Academy is a website that has a built in lab with it that requires the user to successfully write the code in order to advance through the module. It also has a support community for people to ask questions if they get stuck.

Answer 5

I'd state my competences (where I can help without having to study a week to come up to speed) beforehand, and tell them I can't be of much help outside that range.

That said, being able to use Python (perhaps as part of sagemath), or perhaps some language like Mathlab will be very valuable for them later on. Yes, spreadsheets are Turing complete, but that doesn't mean anything. It is much more important that the program is clearly written, and can be fixed/extended by somebody else (even yourself after not looking at it for a couple of weeks).