Glencora Borradaile

I changed up a few things in my undergraduate algorithms course this year.  I probably wouldn’t have if I wasn’t charged with designing an online version of the same course, one that would be static for at least three years, so far as I understand it. One major thing that I changed was the assignment [...]

I’ve just finished teaching our undergraduate algorithms course this quarter.  I changed the course quite a bit from previous iterations.  This was mostly because I have been designing an online version of the course for our online post-bacc degree (more on that in another post).  It gave me a chance to rethink many aspects of [...]

Last quarter, three students I was teaching spoke with me about their depression.  Three of the 160 or so students I was teaching. This was the first time a student had spoken with me about their mental health.  I was happy that these students felt that they could approach me.  I was uncertain of what [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I recently got my teaching evaluations back for a graduate course on approximation algorithms that I taught in the spring quarter.  They were significantly better reviews than I’ve received in my previous courses (which were okay – slightly above the College average).  I chalked it up to it being the first course I taught for [...]

One of my experiments in teaching this quarter was to have a quiz the second week of class on material that I considered so basic, that if you couldn’t do very well on the quiz, well, you may well consider (re-)taking the undergrad algorithms course first.  A few students with lower scores on the quiz [...]