Teaching Computer Science in the Community
Speaker
Benny Chor
Institute
School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University
Time & Place
Thu, 09 Nov 2017 13:00:00 NZDT in Erskine 315
Abstract
The School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel, has initiated and carried out a project titled “Teaching Computer Science in the Community”. The project aims to introduce scientific thinking and basic computer science concepts in an informal setting to school children from low socio-economic background. The project is implemented as a single semester undergraduate elective course, in which third year computer science students teach in schools and community centers. Here, we describe the spirit, content, and structure of the course and discuss insight we have gained over the last four years of teaching it.
Joint work with Assaf Zaritsky
Biography
Benny Chor received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT, in 1980, 1981, and 1985, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis, under the supervision of Professor Ron Rivest, was titled "two issues in public key cryptography”, and won an ACM dissertation award.
In 1985-1987 he was a post-doctoral fellow at MIT and at Harvard University. He was a faculty member with the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion during the years 1987-2001. From 2001, he is a faculty member with the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University. During November 2017 to February 2018, he is a sabbatical visitor at the university of Canterbury.
Benny Chor has supervised 8 Ph.D. students and 22 M.Sc. students. His research interests span cryptography, distributed computing, computational biology, and Computer Science and Mathematics education.