I’m particularly interested in computer science education, and appreciate any chances I have to increase my stengths in teaching and interact with students.

CMSC 330, Summer 2015

Course webpage

Link to GitHub repository with examples

During the summer of 2015, I taught CMSC 330, an undergraduate course on programming languages. CMSC 330 covers a wide range of concepts in programming languages: both foundational and practical. In particular, the students learn OCaml, Ruby, and Prolog, and learn core material such as automata theory (finite state machines and grammars) and programming language semantics.

For the Summer 2015 iteration of the course, I reworked a large part of the lectures to cover the same set of material, but presented it in an interactive style: developing concepts in class, while supplementing this development with projects and course notes. I also elected to put more emphasis on teaching functional programming and programming language semantics. The course included extensive coverage of small step semantics: for one project students implement an interpreter for a core-ML.

Relevant lecture material I particular enjoyed writing includes:

• A set of lecture notes on introductory functional programming

• Notes on the lambda calculus and introductory semantics in the big, small, and abstract machine style

• Notes on the OCaml module system

One off lectures

Occasionally I get invited to give one-off lectures in various classes. I see this as a great opportunity to expend some energy into digesting a topic well enough to present it to other people in a comprehensible way. In particular, I have a set of lectures I’ve given (some a few times) in courses:

• A set of slides on dependent types for David Van Horn’s CMSC631 graduate class on programming languages