Veljko Pejovic - Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
Unleashing the creativity and aptitude in computer science requires grasping concepts that have content and form that may be radically different than what students are used to see in other classes. In computer science learning can happen only if students are fully devoted to the subject matter and if they understand their own cognitive processes. My strongest motivator for becoming a teacher is the fact that the process of learning computer science needs a more subtle form of knowledge presentation than a simple ex-cathedra lecture. Rather, teaching computer science requires a carefully crafted approach that relies on the teacher to recognize and harness students individual abilities and spark interest in exploring computer science. To this end, my approach is to connect well-known topics that students can relate to and shape the course materials to provoke students to reason about the topic from the computer science perspective. My teaching technique is, above all, aimed towards bringing the computer science way of thinking close to my students. By working this way, instead of giving them solutions for current problems, as a teacher I can empower them to reason about the problems that are yet to come.
Instructor
In summer 2011 I taught, structured the syllabus, and designed lecture materials for CMPSC 8 Introduction to Computer Science course held at the Computer Science Department, University of California Santa Barbara. I presented introductory computer science concepts such as variables and expressions, data and control structures, algorithms, debugging, program design, and documentation to fifty students with little or no programming experience.
The full course syllabus can be found here: CMPSC8-Summer2011
Teaching assistant
I held discussion sections, implemented course programming materials and graded for the following courses at the Computer Science Department, University of California Santa Barbara: Computer Security, Introduction to Computer Communication Networks, Introduction to Computer Programming, Parallel Programming and Foundations of Computer Science