The CS-Ed Podcast

Teaching Associate, what's that? In this two-part series's first episode, we talk with Kate O'Hanlon, a teaching associate in the computer science department at Duke University. Teaching associates are department staff positions that support the large enrollment classes. We discuss the four primary teaching associate responsibilities: project manager, student outreach, developer, and instructor. I...

Today's episode is with Richard Ladner from AccessComputing and AccessCSforAll, Professor Emeritus from the University of Washington. Our discussion focuses on accessibility. How do we improve accessibility in our teaching? What do AccessComputing and AccessCSforAll do? And how do we be considerate of our students that are hard of hearing, blind, or have some other accessibility need? Edited by Mi...

In this episode, we talk with Michael Ball from the University of California, Berkeley. Our focus is on undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs), which Berkeley has a long history of. Michael goes into detail about what Berkeley TAs do, the TA hierarchy, and TA training. We learn about a small core group of students that make an undergraduate career out of being TA. Another question we focus on is...

In part two of our episode series with Kevin Lin and Brett Wortzman from the University of Washington, we dig into the details of how they implement their alternative grading systems. Brett outlines their ESNU system that stands for exemplary, satisfactory, not yet and unaccessible, as well as the components of his grading system for his large CS1 course, and Kevin talks about his version from his...

In a two-part episode series, we talk with Kevin Lin and Brett Wortzman from the University of Washington about alternative grading practices. In this episode, we focus on the purposes and goals of grading and discuss different types of grading systems. We dig into the philosophy of Kevin and Brett’s grading approach, how it can work in very large courses, and how to get buy-in from students on an...

Hello, everyone! We are going to have a season 3! But we are going to try something new. Rather than six episodes released every few weeks, we are going on an irregular schedule. We’re picking a theme and running with it until we run out. This season’s theme is “What’s next?” where we focus on how we've rethought our teaching since covid-19. We’ve got a few episodes lined up and the goal is to rel...

For this season’s last episode, we talk with Jacqueline Smith, an Assistant Professor of the teaching stream in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. We talk about U of T’s large flipped CS1. We started with the class’s specifics, how it’s flipped, and their “prepare, rehearse, and perform” cycle. Then we discussed their decision to have a synchronous part of the class d...

In this episode, we talk to Leigh Ann DeLyser, co-founder and executive director of CSforAll. Our topic is the need to reform systems for sustainable equity. We discuss what it means and what CSforAll does. We also discussed the specific difficulties our host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, has with her CS1 class and how it’s actually a systems problem. See the transcript on the website (https://csedp...

Joining us today is Joe Feldman, author of Grading for Equity and the CEO of Crescendo Education Group. We discuss the historical overview of grading and why now is a good time to rethink our grading process to make it more equitable. We got concrete by discussing our host’s, Kristin Stephens-Martinez’s, syllabus for her class and changes she was considering after reading Grading for Equity. One s...

In this episode, we talk with Nicki Washington, a full Professor of the Practice at Duke University, about cultural competence. We discuss the definition of cultural competence. Its history, why we should care, and what it means in the context of computer science. We also talked about Nicki's new class on this topic and her 3C Fellows program. Finally, we close with a call to action. Many people a...

Our guest today is Jared O’Leary, the Director of Education and Research at BootUp PD. Jared creates computer science curriculum and professional development and is also the creator of the CSK8 podcast. Our topic was what K–12 and higher education computer science education can learn from each other. We discussed Jared’s philosophy and curriculum design process, as well as why K–12 and higher educ...

In this episode, we talk with Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Our topic is supporting students of color. We discussed why this support matters and the differences between professors versus students and equality versus equity. We also discussed how he changed his grading practices for his remote class. He even shared about changing his syllabus t...

We are launching season 2 of The CS-Ed Podcast on January 4th, 2021! The year 2020 has caused so much disruption and calls for change, which led us to make this season's theme "Where should we go from here?" Join us for this season as our host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, discusses with her guests about pedagogy and inequality in hopes it will give us all an opportunity to reflect rather than react...

In this episode, we talk with Colleen Lewis, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College. She specializes in computer science education and diversity issues, as well as is the creator of http://csteachingtips.org/, which we at the CS-Ed Podcast post about often. This conversation was a question and answer with Colleen. Our topics included: peer instruction, how she structures he...

In this episode, we talk with Armando Fox, Professor of Computer Science and Faculty Advisor to the MOOCLab at UC Berkeley. With David Patterson, he co-designed and co-taught Berkeley’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on “Engineering Software as a Service,” offered through edx.org. It is now a professional certificate in “Agile Development Using Ruby on Rails. Our conversation touched many...

In this episode, we talk with Mark Guzdial, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Our conversation focused on live coding, which is programming in front of the class as the students would program. Mark emphasized that the most essential part of live coding is modeling process. The second par...

In this episode, we talk with Amy Ko, an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School. She directs the Code & Cognition Lab and studies human aspects of programming. Our conversation focused on how to teach students to debug, a skill many of us undoubtedly struggle to get our students to do effectively. Amy suggests: step 1 is to have students articulate what is happe...

In this episode, we talk with Dan Garcia, a teaching professor at UC Berkeley in the EECS Department. He was selected as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012 and ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2019. He has won all four of his department’s computer science teaching awards. Our conversation focused on designing exams, which he boiled down to his five-finger rule: (1) material coverage, (2) reasonable...

In this episode, we talk with David Malan from Harvard University, Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He teaches Computer Science 50, Harvard University’s largest course. Our conversation focused on CS50 tools. An overview of the tools is in a YouTube video David provided. We spent most of our time talking about help50 and style50. Help...

Welcome to the CS-Ed podcast, a podcast where we talk about teaching computer science with computer science educators to learn how they teach and manage their classrooms.