Teaching

Courses

At Wellesley, I have been involved in teaching the following courses:

  • CS 110 Computer Science and the Internet (Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Spring 2014, Fall 2014). This course was retired in Fall 2016.
  • CS 111 Computer Programming & Problem Solving (Fall 2011, Fall 2013, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018). This is the intro course to the CS major.
  • CS 114 The Socio-Techno Web (Fall 2009). This course was one of the first in the world to use App Inventor as a programming environment, while it was still in alpha.
  • CS 232 Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2010, Fall 2012, Fall 2015, Spring 2018).
  • CS 234 Data, Analytics, and Visualization (Spring 2016, Fall 2017).
  • CS 249 Web Mashups (Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2015). This course is not offered anymore.
  • CS 349 Topics in CS: The Intelligent Web (Spring 2012).
  • CS 315 Data and Text Mining for the Web (Spring 2017).

On Leave

I am on academic leave for the whole year 2018-2019. I'll be teaching my classes in 2019-20.

Office Hours: I'm not holding office hours this year. Please send me an email to schedule a time to meet.

Computer Science Education

App Inventor. Since 2009, I have been an active member of the App Inventor community. I have taught several courses that used App Inventor as a learning environment, as well as held App Inventor workshops in different settings for individuals of ages 5 to 90. Additionally, I am involved in performing research with App Inventor data, in order to gain insights on how people use App Inventor to learn programming. Such insights can lead to improvement of the App Inventor platform and its educational materials.

Data Science. In October 2016 I presented the paper "Students' prior knowledge of data visualization" at the 1st Pedagogy of Data Visualization Workshop. In April 2017, I presented a poster at AERA'17 titled "Embedding Computational Thinking Practices into Data Science Education. In February 2017, I participated in the 1st Data Science Education Technology conference, and I've committed to be in the organizing committee for the second conference, once funding has been awarded.

CS1 courses. In Fall 2015, I introduced Jupyter notebooks in our CS 111 Python course, and I shared experiences about this experiment during Boston's JupiterDays in 2016. Since January 2016, I have been leading a project to use written reflections in CS 111 as a tool for self-evaluation and self-regulation. In 2017, I received a Mellon grant for evidence-based teaching to study their effectiveness. My two student research assistants in this project, Jess Abramson '19 and Khonzoda Umarova '20, presented results from the project in Ruhlman 2017.