My experience as an instructor for CS 1044 Intro to programming using C++ at Virginia Tech

During the summer of 2015, I was offered the position of instructor for the CS 1044 introduction to programming at Virginia Tech. I had the freedom of developing the curriculum from scratch. The class strength was 15 students.As an instructor, I strived to improve overall participation of students in the class. I noticed that despite my best efforts class participation for questions posed to the students during class was low. I decided to explore ways of increasing overall participation to get more feedback on learning outcomes.I started using a tool called Socrative. This web-based tool allowed me to create pop quizzes and pose questions during class. Students could answer these questions anonymously. This helped me to get live feedback about the students' understanding while teaching.

Using Socrative, I was able to create ananymous quizzes on the fly in a classroom setting. I could pose questions to students to gauge their understanding. Since they could be answered anonymously. I could get feedback from them and modify my explanation. I would pose questions both conceptual and programming snippets. This enhanced my understanding of the student's understanding greatly.

During the class, my focus was also on creating an inclusive atmosphere in the classroom. After teaching a concept, I would have an in-class live coding exercise to apply the concept. If a student would finish his/her exercise he/she would have the opportunity to help other students in the class. I would also pose challenges a particular student faced as a debugging exercise for the class. The goal of this exercise was to provide exposure to students about potential pitfalls in programming. From a technical angle, I started from the Hello World in C++ and covered the following topics: conditional branching, loops, functions, searching and sorting, arrays pointers and references, and classes in C++. Overall, I really enjoyed the teaching experience as it gave me a chance to innovate in a classroom setting and address some of the gaps I have personally felt during my own learning as a student!