Comfortable Cohorts and Tractable Teams
Nathan Brunelle, DAVID B. EVANS · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022
Instructors of introductory theoretical computing courses need to overcome lower initial student motivation ("Why do I need to learn this if I just want to be a programmer?'') and higher student discomfort ("I'm not really a 'math person'.'') to provide an engaging, inclusive, and effective learning experience for students. We present a structure for teaching large ($\sim$300 students) theory of computation courses that enables rich student collaboration and frequent student-staff interaction. We developed this structure to adapt a course that we had previously taught in large lecture format to work in a fully-virtual environment, as mandated by our university's Covid lockdown. Our experience with it led us to adopt many elements of this structure in subsequent and future courses, including those that meet in person. We anecdotally observed that this structure improves students' understanding and enthusiasm for the material. It also facilitated easier teaching assistant recruitment and retention. This paper relates our experience with forming cohorts, designing assignments, and managing teaching assistants, and discusses application of insights gained from this experience to future in-person and virtual courses.