ME 218 from a TA's perspective
ME 218 is a three quarter long class at Stanford in the ME department. It's a crash course on microcontroller and the associated electronics that are most often used in mechatronic systems. Each quarter culminates with a final project in which students form teams, build some sort of robot, and compete in some game with that robot. I took ME 218 in 2009-2010. Click here to see what my year was like. At the end of the year, the professor selects two students to be teaching assistants for next years class. I was lucky enough to be one of those TAs.
As a TA, you spend most of your time helping students with software and hardware questions. In the begging of the class (1st quarter), students have short and simple questions which are readily answered, but as the class progresses, their questions become deeper and more intricate. By the end of the class, many students know almost as much as you and some of the best students probably know more...
When you're not debugging code with students, you are most likely working on the final project for the quarter. In 218 A (fall quarter), there is no need for any final project infrastructure, and so . In 218 B (winter quarter), the infrastructure is generally intensive, as the robots typically play a game in a field that interacts with them. For my year, we chose to have students play a modified version of basketball. They had to get basketballs (yellow nerf balls) from ball dispensers, and drop them trh
As a TA, you spend most of your time helping students with software and hardware questions. In the begging of the class (1st quarter), students have short and simple questions which are readily answered, but as the class progresses, their questions become deeper and more intricate. By the end of the class, many students know almost as much as you and some of the best students probably know more...
When you're not debugging code with students, you are most likely working on the final project for the quarter. In 218 A (fall quarter), there is no need for any final project infrastructure, and so . In 218 B (winter quarter), the infrastructure is generally intensive, as the robots typically play a game in a field that interacts with them. For my year, we chose to have students play a modified version of basketball. They had to get basketballs (yellow nerf balls) from ball dispensers, and drop them trh
Winter quarter
We CADed the entire field because having solidworks parts allowed us to create the necessary files to lasercut most of the parts. This allowed us to design more intricate
Feedback from students
Click on the picture for the PDF
Here is some feedback I collected from the students at the end of the year. It shows what the students in the class thought of me as their TA.