Sam Kolovson

In the Fall 2021 quarter, I taught two sections of a course on introductory programming concepts to 36 total master’s students across both sections. Students started the quarter with little to no prior programming experience. The concepts I covered in this class are variables, conditionals, functions, parameters, loops, arrays, and objects. As the Intructor of Record I planned and delivered live programming demos to the class in p5.js, worked with two course graders to grade and deliver feedback to the students, and supported students with debugging their code, mastering the concepts covered, improving code style and readability, and accomplishing their goals within and beyond the learning objectives.

In the winter of 2021, I was a teaching assistant for both the undergraduate and master's capstone courses. During this quarter I assisted the capstone teams in planning their projects, developing their ideas, and beginning to conduct research. In the spring of 2021, I continued as a teaching assistant for the undergraduate course where I worked more closely to guide four teams through their capstone project.

In the Fall 2020 quarter, I taught introductory programming concepts to 15 master’s students with little to no prior programming experience. These concepts included variables, conditionals, loops, arrays, and objects. As the Intructor of Record I planned and delivered live programming demos to the class in p5.js, graded assignments, and supported students in a virtual learning environment.

In the spring 2019 quarter, I worked with Elin Björling as a teaching assistant for her HCDE masters qualitative methods course. In this course we guided HCDE masters students in understanding different qualitative methodological approaches and methods, and how to design a qualitative study, especially choosing the right methodology and methods for their project.

In the summer of 2018, I taught my first course as the primary instructor for UX Design: The Game for You, a course that is part of the Robinson Center Summer Stretch Program. The Robinson Center and this program is geared towards highly capable young pre-college and college students. Thus, while my students were 15 years old, I taught similar material to that taught at a college level. Over this five week intensive course, students learned the UX design process in the context of board game design. Each week was devoted to a different part of the process. In week one, we started by understanding our context, game design. Then, in week two, we conducted user research, followed by ideation, sketching and prototyping in week three. Finally in weeks four and five, the students iterated on their games before their final presentations on the last day. As part of the class we also had a programming bootcamp day where the students learned p5.js and Git, and we took a field trip downtown to Amazon. All lectures were designed from scratch. Insipration for journal reflection and homework assignments came from Pierre Delcourt, the previous instructor for this course.

In the first iteration of this course for the new Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) Program in Bellevue, WA, I assisted Brock Craft in running peer reviews during class and assessing the student's work. The focus of this course was on the process of designing and prototyping in 2D and 3D, which means we emphasized iterating on design instead of creating a perfect design. Despite having no prior experience with designing in 2D and 3D, my background in CS, HCI, and HCDE was useful in emphasizing the need to "fail early and often" in the design process. Additionally, by the end of the quarter I had developed competency in Adobe Illustrator and laser cutting.

Brock Craft and I made slight modifications to the Fall course to keep the last few weeks focused on graphics and interative programming as opposed to more typical computer science problems. This course only included six students in this iteration, hence the single gallery page.

Andy Davidson and I worked to create a two-credit curriculum for this course that would teach 35 students basic programming concepts (variables, conditionals, functiions, parameters, loops, and arrrays) in 10 weeks. Students were taught to program in p5.js, a JavaScript library of the language Processing. These languages were specifically developed to make coding accessible for beginningers, a main goal of this course. The course included six assignments that reinforced each of these six concepts. Students were always encouraged to be creative with the assignments and the final project was completely open-ended, though students were encouraged to as much as they could of what they learned. Though the students had a range of programming experience, the purpose of a slow pace was to give students a solid grounding in basic concepts so that they could continue learning on their own after the course. Also, for some students, this course helped them better understand the challenges developers face.

Please check out the students work in the links below!