Adam Blank

CS Talk: Friday, January 10, 2025, at 10 am in HFH 1132.

Title: Making Space for Students and Their Needs (on a Budget)

Abstract: As classes get larger, giving equitable individual attention to every student becomes nearly impossible without systems and policies that are carefully developed over time to maintain these relationships. One part of the equation that is often overlooked is the physical spaces that this attention occurs in.

In this talk, we describe our recent work developing a physical “computer science collaboration space” at Caltech. Our space serves as a nexus for undergraduate office hours, active learning classes, hybrid staff meetings and classes, and a place for undergraduates to meet up, socialize, and do collaborative work. In addition to a physical space renovation, we instrumented the space with important amenities, software, and hardware carefully chosen to encourage positive help-seeking behavior, office hours throughput, student satisfaction and learning, and feelings of safety and inclusion in all events held in the room. And we did it on a budget.

Bio: Adam Blank (they/them) is a Teaching Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. They enjoy experimenting with new pedagogical ideas involving technology, human computation, and collaboration to improve the classroom experience for all students, no matter their background. Adam teaches a wide variety of core Computer Science courses including systems programming, mathematical foundations for computer scientists, and data structures. During their graduate work, they developed and taught a new discrete mathematics course at Carnegie Mellon; then, they taught in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science at UW full-time for four years. They have taught more than 2000 students at these schools and supervised more than 200 teaching assistants.