UW News

October 3, 2002

Steve Wolfman, Computer Science & Engineering


A word of warning if you attend one of Steve Wolfman’s computer science courses: expect the unexpected.

Game shows, buglers, problems with nonsensical solutions and primal screaming are all fair game in classes taught by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering doctoral student. And all have an underlying purpose.

“I feel there is a need to jar people at the beginning of each class to shift them from what they have been doing to what we are going to be doing,” explained Wolfman. “So I make a conscious effort to do crazy or silly or active or interesting things to start us off.”

Like the re-creation of Monte Hall’s Let’s Make a Deal with class members as contestants to illustrate a “horrifically counter-intuitive” homework problem involving probability and statistical analysis.

Or the CSE staffer, dressed in full Scottish parade regalia, who opened a class with a rousing rendition of reveille. “He got a standing ovation.”

Or Wolfman’s own blood-curdling scream the first day of a lecture class of more than 200 students as he explained that large classes can do some things smaller groups can’t. To illustrate the point, he then instructed his TAs to shriek in unison — a bit louder than his own shout. Then he had the class stand and do the same.

“It’s a good thing Kane Hall is reinforced for earthquakes,” he chuckled. “They would have brought the place down.”

Such strategies are part of the unorthodox approach that makes Wolfman’s classes so memorable — and effective — according to students and professors in the department. They are also the reason he’s among this year’s winners of an Excellence in Teaching Award.

Wolfman’s classroom performance in the two courses he has taught as an instructor, Data Structures and Introductory Programming, is nothing short of “awesome,” said David Notkin, CSE chairman, and his student evaluations have been fabulous.

“Quite simply, Steve has outperformed — by a substantial amount — every faculty member who has taught the other 114 recorded offerings of these courses,” Notkin said. “That includes a group of four award-winning professors.”

For Wolfman, the secret seems to be a genuine joy for engaging in the teaching process and the give-and-take between class and instructor. All computer scientists like puzzles, he said. It’s at the core of what they do, and puzzles with relatively immediate solutions are particularly satisfying. Teaching, he said, is full of opportunities to solve such puzzles.

“That’s one piece of it I love,” he said.

Wolfman also strives to put class concepts into familiar frameworks. When his data structures class organized a study session to watch the original Star Wars, it wasn’t just an opportunity to eat pizza and enjoy a cool flick. The students could earn bonus points if they thought up a data structures joke based on the movie.

“It was a wonderful community building experience, but it was also a great step in connecting data structures with all of the other pieces of knowledge they have,” he said. “It was silly in one sense, but it also prompted them to start thinking about what they had learned with respect to all sorts of other things that they previously would have compartmentalized.”

Wolfman is finishing his doctoral degree with research in educational technology. Graduation is slated for next year, and he hopes to be able to teach one more class before then. “This summer I’ll be developing the tools that we are going to try to put in the classroom,” he said. “If I get far enough along with that, it makes a lot of sense for me to teach to be able to try them out.”

That would be a great benefit for students, according to past pupils like Leo Daedalus, a member of that large programming class that Wolfman asked to scream to demonstrate their collective power. Daedalus had come to the UW somewhat relucantly from a small college in Oregon, nervous about becoming lost in the crowd, to finish a degree begun years before. When he walked into the programming class, he thought his fears were confirmed.

The group shout, he said, became a defining moment for him.

“Steve had many more great things to say about our giant class that day, more serious things to be sure,” Daedalus said. “But our group shout stuck with me as a compelling metaphor and a harbinger of the astounding vitality Steve would generate three times a week in that cavernous lecture hall. In short, I trusted him, and soon the hall became almost intimate.”