I had my first Teaching Experience at Coding Blocks when I TA’ed For the LaunchPad course -- The course I wished I had taken while I was learning to program. I was TA’ing a class with around 50 students.

As a TA my responsibilities included:

  • Helping Students to learn.
  • Preparing Assignment Questions
  • Figuring out tricky-test cases
  • Solving their doubts.
  • Helping to solve more & more questions

Here are some skills that I gained from Being a TA:

  • Building Confidence - It made me a more confident person than I ever was and now I can do a presentation with almost no stage fear at all.
  • Time management - attend your regular college, manage all your coursework, prep for TA sessions and hold doubt classes.
  • Mentorship Skills - , I still have folks reaching out to me for advice on courses and Internship hunt. It is an extended part of my job now where I help them through whatsapp messages and I still like it.
  • Out-of-the box thinking - Got to see some awesome out-of-the-box thinking while debugging codes of other students.
  • Learning New Stuff - Learned new concepts and deepen the understanding of old concepts while Teaching the class.

It’s also interesting to be on the “other” side of a class, because it’s made me appreciate the work that goes into putting together a large lecture hall style course. The Instructor and TA’s have to make sure assignments are relevant, students understand everything taught in the class. There are unique of stresses involved like there is a difficult topic taught in class and now most of the students don’t get it in one go so you have to explain again and again to everyone individually. TA-ing can be fun and productive if you choose to make it so. And it can be frustrating if you choose otherwise.

Apart from working hard we had loads of fun also. Whole coding blocks family went to an outing to watch Fast and Furious 8. I got to meet and work with many brilliant minds. At Coding Blocks most of the Instructors and even TA’s are Gsoc’ers or are working in great startups and companies. I got to make some real connections and friends at Coding Blocks. I think one of the things which make coding blocks great is the warm and friendly nature of everyone working here.


Movie Outing With Coding Blocks Family

Me(on the left) With Prateek Narang (Instructor) and Piyush Narang (Another TA)