Date: July 20, 2023
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: 432 Newell Drive, Gainesville, FL, 32611
Host: Department of CISE
Admission: Free

Title: Pointers, References and Arrays: A Demo for Student Engagement and Effectiveness of Teaching in Computer Science

Bio: Dr. Sareh Taebi is currently a senior instructor and research associate with the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University. Her role involves teaching core CS classes to a large and diverse body of students. With innovative teaching techniques and strategies not only has she helped to improve student learning experiences, but also attract more students into the field of computing. In 2022, she won the faculty teaching award in the college of Engineering and CS. Dr. Taebi’s experiences cover both industry and academia.
She has worked at Intel Labs in addition to local companies. Her current research interests include advances in CS education; she was awarded the ACM SIGCSE 2023 Faculty Travel Fund and has been selected to participate in the NSF instructor training workshop on distributed and parallel computing. She is also actively involved in advising and mentorship of UG and graduate students and was selected as one of FAU Women Leaders in STEM in 2019. Dr. Taebi holds a PhD from the University of Waterloo and an MSc degree in EE from the University of Ottawa. She has many peer-reviewed articles and one patent because of her postgraduate research.

Abstract: Nationally, computer science enrollment has been on the rise and attracting students from diverse backgrounds seeking promising career prospects. The challenge for educators is to train, embrace and retain all students in such a way that each graduate can succeed in joining a segment of the computing workforce. The purpose of this talk is to provide a teaching demonstration that highlights effective teaching strategies. The topic is related to the basic language mechanisms for referring to memory. As such, we will provide a first look into pointers, then explain the reference and dereferencing operators. We will then relate pointers to arrays and illustrate pointer arithmetic with examples. As an application, we will describe different function calling mechanisms in C++. In the second half of the talk, we will explain some strategies for effective teaching: good organization, interactive and engaging lectures, tangible assessment, inclusiveness, and adaptability. To conclude, some examples and success stories will be shared with the audience.