Preparing for the very first CSC110Y1 offering

I first began developing “CMP1” (pronounced comp-one) course materials as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019. Foundations of Computer Science I and II were new courses to the curriculum intended for a new (at the time) direct-entry stream for high-school students into computer science. I would go on to become a faculty member in 2020, co-teaching the first offering of the course in the Fall of 2020 with Professor David Liu.

I worked alongisde Professor Liu and Shannon Komguem (once a student, now an alumnus) on the course. Many of my efforts went into the first drafts and iterations of the online course notes and worksheets. Overall, I contributed to 10 chapters of the original course notes and played a major role in developing the simulation case study that the course would end on. Since CSC110Y1 and CSC111H1 were replacements for both programming (CSC108H1, CSC148H1) and theory (CSC165H1) courses, we made a concerted effort to demonstrate how the two areas of computer science are connected.

Unrelated to course development, but still something I am proud of, is convincing David of the power of Makefiles to build course content from source files (like Markdown or Latex). The majority of the course materials (like the notes and worksheets) are in Markdown. They are converted into HTML (and, sometimes, PDF) with pandoc, which takes some set up to get working. We were able to generate all the files with one call to make by setting up Makefiles in various directories.

As the pandemic raged in the background, David and I continued working on the course over the summer. At which time, I had the pleasure of co-supervising work-study students Callum Cassidy-Nolan, Amy Peng, and Evan Kanter (see the original job posting). The summer months, I believe, are when we developed the reference code for several aspects of the course, including tutorials and assignments.