Teaching

CPSC 4820/6820 and IE 4910/6910 – Web-Accessibility and Inclusive User-Interfaces

This special topic class is a 3-credit hour course that introduces students to web accessibility and inclusive user interface design, that is, the design and evaluation of user interfaces for diverse users and use contexts. Building on basic concepts in human-computer interaction, students will learn about design exclusion and barriers to use, and methods by which these can be overcome. Assistive input and output technologies will also be covered. Populations include older adults, users with visual, cognitive or motor impairments, users who are deaf or hard of hearing, children, users in low resource contexts, and users in mobile contexts. Research trends and practical design considerations (e.g., web accessibility requirements) will be covered. Students will interact with the material through readings, discussion, individual and group assignments.

For the first month of the course, students complete a Web Accessibility Certificate offered by the World Wide Web Consortium. After becoming certified, students work with a co-designer who identifies as a part of the teams’s target disability community to evaluate and re-design a website to address accessibility violations surfaced during the evaluation. Local businesses’ websites will be used for the project so as to support a more accessible and inclusive community. As a final deliverable, students will design a research poster and write a final report based on their findings. Students taking the class at the 6000 level will submit a final report in an extended abstract research paper format – with the intent of submitting their work as a conference publication after the class. To conclude the class, a poster session will be held for students to present their work to local business partners whose websites they redesigned, as well as to faculty and students from across the college.

CPSC 1210 – Computational Thinking

We use computers in all aspects of our lives – to connect with friends and family, play video games, watch movies, order food, create documents and presentations, and express ourselves. However, most of us are only consumers of modern technology, using programs and software that others have developed. What if you could create and make your own programs and translate your own ideas into code?

CPSC 1210 is precisely about that. It is a creative and engaging way to learning the principles of computer science. Students learn to create and analyze programs using Snap!, a beginner-friendly, graphical programming language that is built around blocks that can be combined into complex programs.

The course is organized around some of the big ideas of computing, such as abstraction, design, recursion, concurrency, simulations, and the limits of computation – all of which are fundamental principles essential to thrive in future courses offered in the School of Computing and a variety of computing and STEM careers. Students will learn how to apply these ideas to solve problems and critically reflect on how existing solutions impact people and society.

Inspiration for this course comes from the “Beauty and Joy of Computing” (BJC) introductory computer science curriculum developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught as CS10 at Berkeley by Dr. Dan Garcia. Many of the material used in CPSC 1210 are adapted from CS10 and the BJC course repository on GitHub (shared under the CC BY-NC-SA4.0 license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

Teaching Portfolio

Please see my teaching portfolio to view my teaching statement, diversity statement, and other course materials I’ve developed.