My CUTF: Learning Never Ends

Pssst, I posted this on the Frederick Honors College Blog initially.

Today I walked into my Sennott Square classroom for CMPINF 0010: Big Ideas in Computing and Information for the last time this semester. The last class is always somewhat bittersweet, with some students excited that they won’t have to complete weekly skills labs anymore, and others dismayed that they won’t share as many classes with their friends next semester. For me, I try to reflect on the progress the students have made over the semester and cherish the last few final presentations.

I certainly learned a lot about teaching, the SCI student experience, and Big Ideas this semester through my CUTF. I mentioned in my previous post that I had noticed a change in the student population this semester: almost my entire class was made up of freshmen instead of upperclassmen like in the spring. Initially, I thought this would mean spending more time with students in office hours fixing small issues, but surprisingly, I only had a few groups come to my office hours over the course of the semester. My hypothesis is that the new students were too busy getting acquainted with Pitt’s campus to visit office hours, but they continually produced code for assignments that exceeded my expectations. Perhaps this group of students came in with more computer science experience or just found the material to be more entertaining.

I think the most valuable part of my CUTF experience was the increased responsibility and accountability in teaching throughout the semester. Before the CUTF, I didn’t always have time to inspect the materials for each skills lab as deeply as I would have liked before teaching. I would generally review the lab notebooks the night before my lesson and simply ensure the functionality of the code. However, this semester, I read each one of the lab notebooks the week prior to the lesson and kept a detailed log of the alterations I made to them. Then, I took those changes to our group meetings and discussed them in detail with the rest of the teaching team. By dedicating this time each week to review both the conceptual and technical material, I evaluated my goals both as a student and an educator: what would I want to get out of this course if I were taking it? While I didn’t always have much to add or change, I was always thinking about how the seemingly disconnected topics of the course were truly cohesive, and how to help students build intuition for these relationships.

Even though my CUTF has concluded, there’s still plenty of small items in the Big Ideas curriculum I would like to address as a UTA for the class next semester. Each Friday throughout the semester, the teaching staff and UTAs met in a Zoom call to discuss the previous week’s lesson and the current state of the course. At each of those meetings, I took notes on what the other members of the team thought, hoping to consolidate them at the end of the semester so that students in the spring could use improved versions of the labs. Even when I wasn’t actively involved with Big Ideas, the concepts of the course were floating in my mind. During my capstone seminar (CS 1900), I heard several students mention that developing better skills with Git and GitHub would have been beneficial for their internships. This has informed specific changes that I plan to implement in the Big Ideas curriculum covering version control in more detail. On top of changes to the lab content, I hope to finally get the automatic grading software functional for the spring semester. One of the master’s students in the lab I work in is using generative AI to help human graders provide better feedback to students on coding assignments, and I think this technology could be particularly helpful for a course like Big Ideas with many students and short coding assignments.

As for my academic plans after this semester, my goal is to graduate at the end of this year and start a Ph.D. either in computer science or intelligent systems. Hopefully these programs will provide me with more opportunities to teach or otherwise mentor students in computing and information sciences. I’m truly grateful for the incredible experience I was afforded through the CUTF. I would encourage any students with a desire to make a positive change in their academic community to design their own project and apply for the fellowship to be the next educational innovator at Pitt.