Teaching Philosophy Statement

As a child, I often found myself in class, eagerly counting down the minutes until the school bell rang. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy learning—I actually loved it. However, there was something at home I couldn’t wait for: the next episode of my favorite television show. I was undoubtedly hooked, but it was hardly surprising. Each episode was meticulously crafted to build tension and evoke emotion, pulling me deeper into the story. Just as the narrative reached its most gripping moments, the screen would often cut to black, leaving me on the edge as the credits rolled. I’d literally shout at the screen, desperate to know what came next, but this was before the age of on-demand streaming, so I had no choice but to wait.

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself navigating the challenges of a demanding undergraduate engineering program. Despite my passion for learning, I occasionally found it challenging to stay engaged in class, feeling overwhelmed by the heavy workload. Strangely enough, during those moments, I often turned to educational videos as a way to unwind. I couldn’t help but wonder what made these videos so compelling—why despite being educational, they felt like a form of entertainment. I eventually came to a profound realization: these videos weren’t like a form of entertainment, they were a form of entertainment. They were structured exactly like the television shows I loved as a kid. They were crafted like stories, ensuring the content was not only accessible, but also memorable. They built tension, evoked emotion, drew me in, and left me eager for more. This realization has been instrumental in shaping my teaching philosophy. In an unexpected twist, I’ve found that computer science education is most effective when it adopts something computers actually struggle to master: the art of story-telling.

Throughout my teaching career, I have placed considerable emphasis on structuring my courses like stories. This wasn’t always easy, especially with introductory courses that cover a wide range of topics. To navigate this challenge, I developed three guiding principles.

Firstly, just as stories build tension through rising action, I built tension in my courses by carefully ordering lectures to address increasingly complex problems. When I taught a course on reinforcement learning for example, we began by considering a deterministic environment without any agents, then introduced a single agent, and eventually also introduced randomness to the world. However, to keep students engaged, it was essential to instill a sense of hope despite these increasing challenges. I achieved this by deliberately pacing the lectures to incorporate cliffhangers, much like the television shows I loved as a child. In the same course on reinforcement learning, just as students began to feel confident in their understanding of single agent systems, I reminded them that most real-world scenarios involve multiple agents. I emphasized the importance of accounting for this complexity, but ended the class by introducing uncertainty about whether this was even feasible. As a result, students often eagerly awaiting the next lecture.

Secondly, just as the chapters of a story revolve around a central theme, I always designed my lectures to revolve around a concrete goal. For example, when I taught a course on mathematics for robotics, I curated the material to focus around developing a surgical robot. This task was straightforward enough to grasp, yet complex enough to serve as a running example for each topic we explored throughout the course. It was particularly useful when introducing increasingly complex problems, as it provided students with something familiar to reference.

Finally, I draw on the power of stories to elicit emotions and make abstract concepts more tangible by incorporating real-world case studies that are directly relevant to the topics we cover. These case studies either expose pitfalls we should strive to avoid or showcase successes that we should emulate. For example, in a course on machine learning, I presented a case study about a self-driving car accident in which a pedestrian was injured due to flaws in the vehicle’s computer vision models. I also shared the story of a breakthrough in medical imaging, where deep learning improved early cancer detection rates, saving countless lives. By illustrating both the risks and transformative potential of computer science, students not only grasp the practical relevance of their work but also feel motivated to pursue it responsibly and ambitiously.

There is one bonus guiding principle that sets my teaching apart and elevates my lectures beyond even the most engaging stories, namely, literal engagement. Live, in-person classes offer an unparalleled advantage over pre-recorded videos—the ability to interact with students in real-time. This opportunity should be fully embraced to enrich the learning experience. In every class, I strive to create meaningful interactions tailored to the subject and teaching context. One approach that aligns particularly well with my storytelling philosophy is using cliffhangers to pose thought-provoking questions at the end of a lecture. Students then respond to these questions in a few sentences, and I aggregate their answers using a language model to generate concise summaries. These summaries form the basis of an open discussion at the start of the next class. This method ensures no student feels singled out, while providing a platform for collective engagement as students see their perspectives reflected and explored.

By weaving these principles into every course I taught, I found that my students not only looked forward to each lecture but also expressed a genuine interest in exploration the material long after the course had ended. This has reinforced my belief in the power of story-telling. As Walter Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm suggests, our understanding of the world is primarily shaped by the stories we share. Education, therefore, should offer students more than just knowledge about the world - it should equip them with stories that help them navigate that world. With computer science education in particular, it means embracing the very thing that distinguishes us from computers. This is exactly what my teaching philosophy does and why I am such a firm believer of it. By combining my technical expertise with the power of storytelling, I am confident that I can inspire a generation of computer scientists to write the next chapter in the story of technology.