Teaching

I really love teaching CS! It’s fun to be the first one to introduce all the awesome parts of the field to students, and it’s extremely rewarding to see students enjoying coding, design, theory, or whatever.

Teaching CS is also a serious business, and I am always looking for ways to improve my pedagogy. My approach is usually a lecture plus interspersed active class exercises to practice skills and reinforce difficult points. For a summary of my teaching philosophy, feel free to check out my teaching statement (though it is a bit dry).

I generally solicit student feedback (both in terms of how well the liked the lesson and objective measures of understanding). You can see my thoughts on some of my recent teaching here:

  • Feedback from my First Semester Teaching May 11, 2012

    So Duke Spring 2012 is finished, and grades are in; it's time for me to become an ordinary graduate student again. But before I do that, I think it's reasonable to reflect just a bit on how the semester went. All and all, I am happy but not ecstati...

  • My students are awesome (part 2): cs100 December 20, 2011

    CS100 is a your basic CS2 course, providing an introduction to data structures, big O, and of course plenty of practice coding tricky problems. This course is a great favorite of mine to teach, mostly because of the office hours. It's just fun to wor...

  • My students are awesome (part 1): CS149s December 14, 2011

    So one of the coolest traditions at in Duke is CS149s. Officially, it's called the problem solving seminar. Unofficially, it's weekly preparation for ACM ICPC competition. Students work hard in this course: every week they work on a problem set co...

  • CS100 Class Design November 29, 2011

    So I haven't had much opportunity to post about my classes at Duke, but it has been very cool. I've found students at Duke to be very conscientious and smart, and my office hours have been very busy which is always fun. Of course there's still plenty...

  • GHP Theory of Computation Class Summary July 31, 2011

    The second class I taught at GHP was Theory of Computation (entitled "Does Not Compute"). We approached the problem of machine equivalence. This class was a lot of fun and students seemed to enjoy it. You can see my feedback, if you're curious. ...

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