The Math Teach-Off was back again last Friday, this time with a focus on computer science.
On January 31, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., three computer science professors — Dave Tompkins, Troy Vasiga and Carmen Bruni — competed to see who could most improve a group of students’ understanding of an unfamiliar concept in only one hour.
The competition was the fourth such teach-off in less than two years. David McKinnon, chair of Pure Mathematics, first came up with the idea for the event in 2021. In each teach-off, students take a quiz about an unfamiliar topic, receive an hour of instruction, then take another quiz: a kind of iterative learning assessment that Professor McKinnon calls “the gold standard in educational research for measuring teaching.”
In this Friday’s competition, the competing professors were tasked with teaching students the 6502 assembly language, an “old-school” language used in the Nintendo 64, Atari 2600, and other retro pieces of technology. While the professors were familiar with assembly languages in general, this particular one was new to all of them, putting them on an even playing field.
“It’s like trying to convert knowledge from one Romantic language to another,” Professor Bruni explains. “They’re all similar, but they do have some subtleties where if you’re not paying attention, you can get the ideas or syntax confused – making it even harder to teach.”
Professor David McKinnon (left) and MathSoc VP Academic Kareem Alfarra (right) congratulate Professor Dave Tompkins (centre) on his win.