About

Hi everyone! I'm Sam, and for the last four years, I've been a Teaching Assistant for various computer science courses, from CS2 to a graduate-level Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. During this time, I've graded a lot of student homework. Much of it has been code that students have written, but quite a bit has been of the problem-set form, that is, written questions.

Written questions present a problem. Some students take the time to learn LaTeX, others type in Word, but many choose to hand-write their responses. Hand-written responses can be hard to read and get lower grades because of it. This has often made me wonder why students don't use LaTeX.

I've narrowed it down to a few potential reasons:

• Students aren't taught to use LaTeX. They're told "here's this thing, here's a template, use Google & StackOverflow, now go." This can be discouraging, and likely makes students feel as if they can't get help with using it.

• Students are taught LaTeX, but not well. They're only shown the most basic features, but never really shown how to do a lot of things that are necessary to complete homework.

• Students are just scared of LaTeX — it's a bit baroque, error messages are confusing, searching for help can be daunting, and it just seems to take a lot longer to complete homework.

These all seem to boil down to students not learning it. My goal here is to present a series of tutorials to help students learn LaTeX, and learn it well. These tutorials will be presented as videos, with accompanying articles, examples, and a GitHub repository with extra examples available to learn from, including helpful templates.

To this end, I have planned (as of 5 October 2020) seven basic tutorials, a handful of more advanced tutorial, and a bunch of "Tips&Tricks" style posts.