David McKinnon (left) and MathSoc VP Academic Kareem Alfarra (right) congratulate Dave Tompkins (centre) on his win
The Math Teach-Off was back again last Friday, this time with a focus on computer science.
On January 31, from 2-4 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 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,” 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.”
“This was the language used on the chip in my first computer!” Vasiga says. “The teach-off was challenging in a few ways: I didn’t know the background of the students, there was a considerable amount of material to cover in a very short amount of time, and assembly language does have some eccentricities. I tried to focus on the big picture ideas, and connect the new material to something that the students might have been familiar with, which would be more ‘high-level language’ programming in racket or C++.”
As always, the teach-off was a group effort: it was put together through the efforts of McKinnon and Faculty of Math Teaching Fellow Diana Skrzydlo, in coordination with MathSoc. And, of course, none of it would have taken place without the participation of the forty participants – all of whom improved their scores after an hour of instruction.
Ultimately, Tompkins and his students were crowned the winners. “I won, so obviously this was the most sound and scientifically valid pedagogical experiment in human history,” he jokes. “In all seriousness, however, I want to thank ‘Team Yellow’ for participating and coming along with me on the journey, the organizers, and my fellow competitors Troy and Carmen: they raised the bar very high.”
To learn more about the Math Teach-Off, check out our coverage of previous competitions.