Glencora Borradaile

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 [...]

I like to start my grad algorithms course with stable matching.  It is a beautiful, clean, practical algorithm.  It can be covered relatively quickly and give an overview of the basics of algorithm design and analysis.  I love it. What I hate is that every treatment of stable matching available online and in the textbooks [...]

In teaching so far, I have relied almost exclusively on textbooks and other people’s lecture notes (Jeff Erickson comes to mind, again and again) for providing materials to my students.  Yes, I would recommend this to anyone who has not been teaching for too long.  Preparing lecture notes that are hand-out-to-your-students worthy is time consuming! [...]

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 [...]

In a more significant experiment than the am-I-ready-for-this quiz, I am rethinking the assignments that accompany my grad algorithms course.  In last year’s class, I had the grad students work in randomly-assigned and rotating (different for each assignment) groups.  I will comment on this in another post. I’m sticking with the group-based approach – partly for [...]

Last week, I gave the students in my grad algorithms class an am-I-ready-for-this? quiz.  I promised to report back, and I’m already a little late on that.  The average for the quiz was ~ 70% – I was hoping for a higher average, given how easy the quiz was (in my opinion).  Two students did [...]

I am teaching ‘the grad algorithms course’ for the second time.  It is the first time I am teaching a course for the second time and am excited at finally having the opportunity to fix my previous mistakes.  ’The grad algorithms course’ is required for all CS Ph.D. students in our department and a prerequisite [...]