Teaching interests
Dr. Vasiga’s teaching interests include introductory computer science, compilers, data structures, algorithms and theoretical computer science.
Administrative and service responsibilities
Dr. Vasiga is the Associate Dean, Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach, which means that he oversees all of the admissions, entrance scholarship decisions, and outreach activities for the Faculty of Mathematics.
Dr. Vasiga is the Chair of the Canadian Computing Competition (CCC) and co-chair of the Beaver Computing Challenge (BCC), which are computational contests focused on programming and computational thinking. Dr. Vasiga is also the co-coach of the UWaterloo International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) programming teams. As well, Dr. Vasiga has been a long-standing member of undergraduate curriculum, outreach and recruiting committees.
Research interests
Dr. Vasiga’s main research interest is computer science education, specifically the role and application of computing competitions in enhancing student interest in computer science. Additionally, he is also interested in exploring the effects of errors on discrete algorithms, such as primality testing.
Degrees and awards
BMath, MMath, PhD (Waterloo), BEd (British Columbia)
Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching (2009)
Representative publications
D. Pritchard, T. Vasiga. CS Circles. An In-Browser Python Course for Beginners. The 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE '13, Denver, CO, USA, March 6-9, 2013.
G. Cormack, G. Kemkes and J.I. Munro, T. Vasiga. Structure, Scoring and Purpose of Computing Competitions. Informatics in Education (5) pp. 1-22, 2006.
S. Brown, N. Rampersad, J. Shallit, T. Vasiga. Squares and Overlaps in the Thue-Morse Sequence and Some Variants. Theoretical Informatics and Applications, (40) pp. 473-484, 2006.
T. Vasiga and J. Shallit. On the iteration of certain quadratic maps over GF(p), Discrete Mathematics (277) pp. 219-240, 2004.
