In addition to my research in Computing Education, I was a Teaching Assistant for 5 semesters.
My past teaching experiences include:
View my Teaching Philosophy Statement.
Further, I completed the Certificate in College Teaching from The Graduate School at Michigan State University. The certificate included a Mentored Teach Project, “Using Visual Aids to Strengthen Student Understanding in CMSE 201” . While teaching in the virtual environment during the pandemic, I quickly realized the challenges of trying to explain code logic to introductory students without ease of drawing or demonstration and how it hindered the students’ ability to deeply understand the tools we were teaching. In this work, we integrate visual aids in course materials to help students in their understanding of coding practices like lists, data frames, and two-dimensional arrays, particularly in relation to indexing with those tools.
The goal of the visual aids is to help students conceptualize the structure of the object as well as walk through examples that show information retrieval from these objects. With the help of guided questions, we are looking to study how students think about and explain code using descriptive language to their instructors, fellow coding classmates, and non-coders, particularly when thinking about for loops, data access, and array manipulation.
This work provided much insight into the discrepancies between student confidence and accuracy of completing a task, strengthened student understanding of connection between indexing different data types, and encouraged clearer communication between students and instrutors.