David Malan

And the answer is quite clearly no for those students.

And even for most students, I would say we do spend a disproportionate amount of time on certain cherry picked topics that we do think lend themselves to this theatricality.

For really getting students interested in fundamentally and excited by the material to help motivate them the rest of the week when they're going to be spending 5, 10, 15, 20 plus hours on some week's assignment and to help them see sort of the forest for the trees, like what is actually important and meaningful and fun about this, because it's probably not the keystrokes and the debugging and the lower level implementation details.

So we talk about this actually in a paper, in a talk we gave at a CS education conference a few years back, trying to find that balance between the theatricality and the density of material.

But to your question about dryness, I mean, I would like to think that dryness really has no place in most forms of education because, you know, then it could have been a book or it could have been an email.

Like if it's just someone reciting words or worse, writing things down in ways that aren't at all interactive, like do we really need to be

all in this room together, that doesn't seem like the best design to me.

Yeah, I think it's just sort of the expression you got to bring your A game when you get up onto stage.

And I think a lot of it honestly comes from a place of insecurity.

Like, I really don't want to be the one on stage in front of a bored audience.

Like, no one wants to be in that situation.

And so I think a lot of the energy that I try to bring to bear and the excitement I show is really meant to, one, make sure people want to be and stay there for the duration of the class, whether it's short or long, and also help them see the excitement in and the possibilities of and the applicability of a field that I myself have fell in love with so many years ago.

Because then they can decide for themselves if they feel that same emotion, if they too look forward to going home to their dorm or their home on Friday nights and working on...

programming assignments of all things.

But I feel like we certainly owe them, and I think teachers owe students more generally, educationally, the opportunity to make that decision for themselves and to put forward our best foot or to present the field in the most exciting, inspiring way that we can, if indeed we think it's important that other people after us study and research and apply these fields.

Yeah, that's a good question.

Since I think our own goal is certainly not to put out of business other educators, other classes.

However, as a computer scientist, I would be among the first to notice that

There's a huge inefficiency in the way education broadly works, not only in this country, but presumably internationally as well, whereby you have hundreds, thousands of teachers essentially all doing the same thing in parallel and not necessarily the meaningful part of interacting with and uplifting and mentoring students.

but like preparing their presentations or their lecture notes or writing the assignments or grading that work.