Glencora Borradaile

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 [...]

Finally an excuse for my bad black/whiteboardpersonship! Apparently, retention of information is improved if the way it is presented is difficult to read: … if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent … We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things. Aside: the lead author, Connor Diemand-Yauman, either has [...]

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 [...]