After Claire’s post on accidentally taking a classroom microphone with her after teaching, I grumbled to myself “I wish I taught at a fancy university with a fancy microphone in the fancy classroom.” One email later, I learn that there is a microphone in the computer cabinet in the classroom where I teach 130 students. [...]
October 19, 2011
Teaching Matroids
In my grad algorithms class, I taught matroids. This was last Thursday and came on the heels of a class and problem solving session on greedy algorithms. The class, I think, went well. I went slowly (Socratically), building up the definition of a matroid using the graphic matroid as an example, motivated by Kruskal’s algorithm [...]
October 14, 2011
Death by Powerpoint
In my grad algorithms course, I am teaching in an increasingly Socratic way (not all the way there yet) and covering less material as well. Well, going through fewer examples. In my freshman “Orientation to Computer Science” course, I am doing this much less so. I find it challenging because, while the material is quite [...]
October 12, 2011
Reviewing a paper multiple times
It has happened several times to me now. I (sub)review a paper for a conference and for one reason or another the paper is rejected. The next conference deadline rolls around and I get a request to review the same paper. I have never turned down these requests until today, and even today it was [...]
October 11, 2011
Free trip to SODA
Via Kirk Pruhs, and, I am sure, to be reported elsewhere: 10,000 free round-trip tickets to SODA Japan Maybe this will help alleviate the concerns around such a remote (for the US and Europe) location.
October 4, 2011
Note to self: turn off cell-phone data connection during class
In my large intro class I used Robozzle to talk about program control and introduce recursion. Robozzle does use a true call stack and to solve some puzzles (for example, learning stack, recursed, learning stack 2, limit your stack, counting – green) you really need to understand both recursion and how the to use the call stack. This is week [...]
October 3, 2011
My office hours are gender balanced
If I didn’t see the students sitting in the lecture room while I taught and only knew who I was teaching to by the students who speak to me after class, in the hallways or in my office hours, I would think the gender ratio was at least balanced in computer science. Overwhelmingly, one-on-one, my [...]