teaching

As head TA for COMPSCI 446: Search Engines, I noticed that students at my office hours struggled to follow the steps of the PageRank algorithm. Many had limited exposure to the mathematical notation used, and had not taken classes like machine learning which would allow them to draw on related concepts like Expectation Maximization.

I led a group effort to create a Reusable Learning Object for this concept. We opted to make an interactive Google Sheet, which allowed students to freely modify values and get immediate visual feedback showing the consequences.

The instructions for this activity, and a link to the Google Sheet, can be found here.

This project was created as a part of COMPSCI 879: Teaching Assistants as Tomorrow’s Faculty with Jake Goldman, Qizheng Yang, and Cuong Than.