Luther College computer science professor Brad Miller is a true innovator and one of our inspirations here at Trinket. He’s the core maintainer for the Skulpt project, which we use in our Python trinkets, and has built one of the best free online computer science textbook collections around at interactivepython.org.
In this interview, we hear about how he got into teaching, his search for better, more interactive resources, and how he uses interactive tools (many of which he created!) in his own classroom. One of the themes that comes through is how his projects, like all software projects, are embedded within communities of contributors working to solve shared problems. We’re excited and honored to be a part of some of the exciting work he’s doing!
This talk with Brad is one of a series of periodic interviews we do of educational innovators. Other interviews in the series can be found here.
Elliott: You’re doing some awesome things in the classroom, and I’m looking forward to learning more about that. But let’s start with how you got here. Can you give us a sense of your teaching history? How were your first classes different from what you’re doing now?
Brad: I feel sorry for my first students. I had spent 18 years in industry as a programmer and entrepreneur, so when I returned to academia and started teaching I recall that I had to make a lot of adjustments in terms of my own expectations about what students knew and didn’t know and what they were capable of doing. Aside from gradually making my classes easier I have moved from a lecture centric style of teaching to an active style of teaching. I find that I’m much more effective when I can be coaching the students through activities rather than lecturing. Now I rarely lecture for more than a few minutes before I have them working on something.
