Happy New Year! One of the things I'd like for 2026 is to actively improve my teaching.
Teaching is one of those things that, ironically, you are never taught as part of becoming a university professor. Yes, it makes no sense. Up until now, I've relied heavily on my experience GMing TRPGs and self-reflection to prepare my classes but, other than that, it was a lot of self-directed trial and error.
Luckly, last year I made the acquitance of Jeremy Grifsky, a professor from Ohio State University (USA). He has a lot of study and opinions regarding college education and graciously agreed to send me a reading list when I told him I wanted to actively study the topic.
The book from that list that I'm currently reading is "Understanding by Design", a textbook about designing classes. It has been an interesting read, which has helped me formalize some ideas I had to learn by trial and error. One idea that did surprise me was the suggestion to define the evaluation method early in the design process, in a way that is reminiscent of Testing Driven Design in CS. Up until now, I've been generally disdainful of evaluations, focusing instead on teaching as a way to provide learning hooks for students.
Although I still have to finish reading and digesting this and the other books in the reading list, I've been already thinking of what exactly I want to work on this year.
One is to design some material about debugging. Debugging is an extremely important skill in computer science, and yet it is taught nowhere in the curriculum. It is essentially an oral tradition. I think there is a lot that can be taught about debugging, from the necessary mindset, to abstract models (I like this hypothesis-testing strategy of debugging), to specific experiences and tricks.
Another is to redesign my "Experiment Design in Computer Science". It started as a "best practices in experiments" class, which slowly morphed over the years in a kinda-but-not-really statistics class I'm not happy about. I want this class to be about giving the students a critical mindset towards experimentation in Computer Science, and I wonder if I could use this task as a way to test and apply my readings this year.
Talking about things to do this year, I'd like to use this blog more to share knowledge. So this is a start too!