[sp23] mentor 05: Recursion, Tree Recursion

[aaureliaw]

Overall:

• Good timing for the worksheet, and good that there were enough problems to be able to pick and choose
• Good build-up of difficulty

Gibonacci (Q1):

• Good starter question for this worksheet to help introduce students to recursion/tree recursion
• Good timing
• One JM said: For part 2 with the call graphs, not sure how this is actually helpful to students’ overall understanding; I feel like I spent a lot of time on it but would like to be clearer on the particular things it’s teaching since assessments don’t explicitly call for the solving of this sort of problem and programming doesn’t require you to count calls

Fizzbuzz (Q2):

• 10-15 minutes
• One JM thinks that FizzBuzz doesn't necessarily need to be recursive and has a perfectly acceptable iterative solution
• One JM thinks hard for students to do this question on their own, esp. with things like calling fizzbuzz(n - 1) (and not returning it) before the if/elif suite, and since there wasn’t skeleton code to give any hints
• IMPROVEMENT: Potentially be good to provide more scaffolding to make it so students can get through the problem on their own/without waiting for mentors to go through it
• IMPROVEMENT: No explanation for FizzBuzz in meta

Selective Sum (Q3):

• Good concept
• Only took a few minutes

Mario Number (Q5):

• Less than 20 min