Computer science is wildly popular at Universities right now, owing in no small part to the robust job market for CS graduates. This market is driven by the voracious appetite of businesses and the public for “tech.” A consequence of increasing CS popularity is the substantial growth of CS course sizes. Such growth presents a significant challenge to instructors of those courses, as the number of CS instructional staff have generally not scaled linearly with the number of students. How can we teach many more students with roughly the same number of instructors but without a (substantial) reduction in overall quality? One part of my answer to this question is: “clicker” quizzes.
I recently blogged about CMSC 330, the undergraduate programming languages course I (co-)teach at the University of Maryland. That post focused on the content of the course. This post considers the more general question of how to deliver a computer science course at scale, focusing on the lecture component and a key piece of my approach: the use of clicker quizzes during class. I’ll consider other aspects of large course management — student Q&A and grading — in a future post.