Faculty Candidate Colloquium
Abstract: This talk will be a sample lecture from a second-year course on the hardware/software interface. Students will have taken at least two previous programming courses, but this course will likely be their first time seeing C and learning about lower-level concepts including numerical representations, assembly programming, and memory allocation. This sample lecture would serve as the initial introduction to x86 assembly programming, and be followed by about 6 lectures using assembly to cover the low-level implementation of control flow, procedures, arrays, and structs, as well as the concept of buffer overflows. These lectures fall in the middle of the course, so the students will have already seen memory and data representation, number representation for integers and floats, and some C. I will use this lecture to demonstrate how I use active learning and a narrow focus on key concepts to engage students in technical material.

Bio:
Aaron Bauer is a PhD graduate student in Center for Game Science at University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. He received his B.A. in Computer Science from Williams College. He is passionate about teaching with particular interest in systems and data science courses. His research focuses on the intersection of technology and learning, and includes educational games, computer science education, and human-computer problem solving. Using data from digital problem-solving environments, he develops methods for understanding complex problem-solving behavior and studies how those environments could intervene to improve outcomes. He also co-created Dragon Architect, an educational programming game. He received a best paper award at the 2018 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.