Communications of the ACM
On the Pleasures of Teaching Computer Science Students
Yesterday was the most important day of my work calendar. We awarded degrees to 50 computer science students, thus fulfilling one of our main purposes as academics. I had the pleasure of telling some of the top students their marks in person. I've been doing this job for a good few years now, but I still can't quite get used to the buzz I get when students hear that they have succeeded. Their faces are pictures of incredulity, joy, but mostly relief that they made it. I am proud to have played a small part in their learning journeys.
We often interview students as part of our selection process into the first year, at the start of their journey. That can be extremely revealing. It's quite a daunting situation for some teenagers to find themselves in a room with an unknown adult and try to talk their way into a university course. From time to time, though, the young person's sheer passion for computer science shines out through the shyness. One chap this year was carefully cultivating an air of teenage boredom until we stared talking about computer games development, when he revealed his awe and reverence of his game development heroes (who no doubt were bored teenagers themselves once). Another candidate, the first member of his family to apply to university, spoke fondly of how he put his first computer together with his granddad when he was eight years old. School students at our Turing birthday party last year were delighted to talk to our students about their programming projects, as they said their teachers didn't understand what they were working on. I strongly remember one of our current PhD students almost dancing with excitement when he got to talk with one of the professors about Open GL. He had been teaching himself for years but now he had someone else to talk to about his favourite topic. He had come home.
As academics, our role is to teach the foundations of computer science while fuelling - rather than dampening - this passionate geekery. We try to fan the flames of geekery in those who have never had the good fortune to experience it before. It's hard for us to do this, and even harder for the students to keep motivated throughout the long journey to graduation. To get a CS degree at my university, you need to pass 32 different courses, picking up 480 credits on the way. On each of these 32 courses, there are possible ways to slip up: course work whose spec you cannot fathom, compilers which hate you, unit tests which spontaneously fail just before the deadline, exams in which your mind goes inexplicably blank. Many students also have the hurdles of young adulthood to deal with too – a potential mixture of financial hardship, leaving home, relationship break ups, bereavement, or mental health difficulties.
In spite of all this, the students get through it. They learn where to put their semicolons. They grasp how Quick Sort works. They sort out their matrices and master the halting problem. They fall in love with APIs and engrave comms protocols on their hearts. They learn how to write, how to present their ideas, how to think. This is a privilege to witness. Academics really do have the best job.
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