About Me
I am a Master's student at the University of Toronto; my research focuses on CS education. I'm a member of the Software Engineering Research Group of the Department of Computer Science, being supervised by Steve Easterbrook.
I recently graduated from the University of British Columbia, where I completed a BSc in Honours Integrated Sciences (CS/physics/math). My honours thesis was on knowledge transfer between teaching assistants working in pairs. I also spent seven terms of my time at UBC doing research and curriculum development for digital logic labs.
Teaching
Current teaching
CSC 258: Computer Organization
I'm the head TA for the course. I teach labs on Thursdays, tutorials on Fridays, and perform behind-the-scenes work on the labs.
Past teaching
Teaching assistantships at U of T
- Fall 2011: CSC 148 (Introduction to Computer Science)
- Fall 2011: CSC 165 (Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science)
Teaching assistantships at UBC
- Summer 2011: CPSC 221 (Basic Algorithms and Data Structures)
- Spring 2011: CPSC 121 (Models of Computation)
- Fall 2010: CPSC 121 (Models of Computation)
- Summer 2010: CPSC 121 (Models of Computation)
- Summer 2010: CPSC 221 (Basic Algorithms and Data Structures)
- Spring 2010: CPSC 121 (Models of Computation)
- Fall 2009: CPSC 111 (Introduction to Computation)
- Spring 2009: CPSC 121 (Models of Computation)
- Fall 2008: CPSC 111 (Introduction to Computation)
Other teaching roles at UBC
- Spring 2011: CPSC 490: CS Education
- Summer 2010: TechTrek Summer Camp
Research
My main research interest is in CS education. The three areas of CS education I'm currently working in are:
- Incorporating societal context into CS curricula, such as through labs and assignments
- Developing and assessing instructional activities such as labs, assignments and in-class workbooks
- TA training, development and support; particularly for lab-based teaching
Most of my past work has been on longitudinal assessment and refinement of digital logic labs, and studying how to improve support for laboratory TAs. For my MSc thesis, I'm working on assessing different approaches to in-class workbooks for introductory data structures courses. I'm currently expecting to do my PhD work in the area of assessing the impact of incorporating societal context into CS assignments and labs.
Papers and Presentations
On adding context to CS
- Teaching Labs on Pseudorandom Number Generation. Elizabeth Patitsas. Accepted for ITiCSE 2012.
- Teaching CS to Scientists. Elizabeth Patitsas, Steve Easterbook. ICER, August 2011.
On developing and assessing labs
- Effective Closed Labs in Early CS Courses: Lessons from Eight Terms of Action Research. Elizabeth Patitsas, Steve Wolfman. SIGCSE 2012. (Slides here)
- Revitalizing Labs: Lessons from 2.5 Years of Iterative Development and Assessment of Digital Logic Labs (pdf). Elizabeth Patitsas, Steven Wolfman, Meghan Allen. SIGCSE, March 2011. Also presented at the CWSEI End-of-Year Event, April 2011.
- Changes in CPSC 121: toward a coherent picture of computation (pdf). Elizabeth Patitsas, Kimberly Voll. CWSEI End-of-Year Event, April 2010. Also presented at UBC Celebrate Learning, June 2010.
- Circuits and logic in the lab: toward a coherent picture of computation. Elizabeth Patitsas, Kimberly Voll, Mark Crowley, Steven Wolfman. Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, May 2010.
- Revising an Introductory Computer Science Course: Exploratory Labs, Interactive Lectures, and Just-in-Time Teaching (pdf). Gwen Echlin, Piam Kiarostami, Elizabeth Patitsas, Steven Wolfman. CWSEI End-of-Year Event, April 2009.
On supporting teaching assistants
- What can we learn from quantitative teaching assistant evaluations? Elizabeth Patitsas, Patrice Belleville. Accepted for WCCCE 2012.
- Knowledge transfer between laboratory teaching assistants. Elizabeth Patitsas. BSc Honours thesis. April 2011.
Other work
- Parameter Tuning Optimisation of Sorting Algorithms. Elizabeth Patitsas. UBC CS Research Poster Competition, January 2010.
Miscellaneous
This term (winter 2012), I'm coordinating the Social Studies of Computer Science (SSOCS) Reading Group, and co-coordinating the Collaborative Challenges for the Climate Change Research Community (C4RC) seminar series. Join us!
I have an Erdős Number of 4 (Me -> Steve Wolfman -> Richard Anderson -> László Lovász -> Paul Erdős).
I enjoy strategy board games and now have a small collection; I also am a fan of Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 -- someday I'll start putting my DMing notes up here. I also am a longtime member of TarValon.net, and served as a UBC Math Club exec for three years. I'm also an alumna of the IB and Science One programmes.
My Geek Code is: GCS/S/ED d+ s: a-- C++ U++ P+ L++>++++ E- W++ N K- w(--) O- M-(--) V- PS++ PE+(-) Y+>++ PGP t+ 5 X- R+(++) !tv b+++@ DI+@ D--- G++ e++>++++ h x?