Geoffrey Challen, Teaching Faculty

Welcoming students to Illinois, at a moment when nobody knows what computing will look like when they graduate.

Educational tech without most of the educational tech companies: An emerging divide in the technology industry and what it means for computing educators.

Agentic development is not magic, just another skill.

Don't use AI to do assignments not designed to be done with AI.

Maybe I never actually loved to code.

The premium—economic or social—that accrues to people who control access to knowledge or cognitive capacity.

Practicing what you profess.

AlphaGo didn't just beat humans—it changed how we understand Go.

In 2023 I sat down with Aaryaman Patel and Juan David Campolargo Hoyos for a five-hour conversation that touched on education, life, meaning, and everything in between.

Breaking large courses into smaller pieces doesn't make them better.

Live teaching demonstrations are an ineffective way to interview teaching faculty.

Large university courses must and can be better.

When the pandemic hit, we scrambled to create an effective approach to providing one-on-one support online.

There's a ton of variation between teaching faculty positions.

There's a ton of variation between teaching faculty positions.

There's a ton of variation between teaching faculty positions.

How and why we run untrusted Java bytecode in a secure in-process sandbox.

A single exam isn't the solution to assessment.

I've created an interactive, immersive, and effective online learning experience for my CS1 students.

In today's advertures in maintaining your own CS1 infrastructure, how Windows line endings and a persistent student combined to bring down our entire homework grading backend.

In Fall 2021 we began offering Kotlin as a language option in my CS1 course.

Grade uncertainty represents the amount of uncertainty students have about how they are doing in a course.

Why are college courses structured so differently from classes in high-school?

Nothing has been more transformative for my CS1 course than frequent computerized assessments.

Finding ways to measure success or failure is important when teaching any course, but particularly when teaching CS1.

Not every course needs a community.

Teaching large courses can have enormous impact.

Programming is a skill, and if you want students to get better at it, you need to encourage them to practice.

Piazza is not a forum.

With the pandemic seemingly drawing to a close, at least in the United States, it's disappointing to see university students, administrators, and even instructors longing to return to outmoded and ineffective instructional methods.

Recipe programming comprises working of a set of instructions to produce a program that achieves some desired outcome.