James Hays (CSCI) on Teaching & Learning

By Katie Han '17

Salomon 001, where CS18 lectures were held last spring semester. [image via]

On my first day of class for CS18, I remember Professor Hays striding down the aisle of Salomon 001, adjusting his hazel vest, and pulling out a pair of thick chalks from his bag.  Tall and lean in figure, Professor Hays sharply contrasted from the few other professors I had encountered as a freshman—aged, veteran lecturers speaking into the microphones clipped onto their chests. Indeed, it was his first time teaching CS18, one of the standard computer science introductory sequence courses at Brown. To find out more about his experience at the university, I decided to interview him.

Professor Hays started teaching at Brown in January 2010 with graduate level seminars on computational photography and computer vision, which are his research areas. In Spring 2014, he interacted with undergraduate freshmen students for the first time through CS18. “[The greatest difference was that] this course had many higher-level projects. It was a bigger class with a large TA staff of around 25 students—it couldn’t exist without the UTA program.” Throughout the interview, Professor Hays complimented the head TAs, Indy Prentice '15 and Alex Kleiman '15, and emphasized the perks of the TA program, “They are deeply involved, not only in grading, but also in holding lab sessions and developing course material. Although I have the final say in everything, we work together a lot, and of course, it is a pleasure to be around them.”

Professor James Hays [image via]

Professor Hays then began describing his own experiences with computer science when he was our age. “CS classes in my high school were terrible. The quality of education in the 90’s was bad, and I learned nothing of substance for my future career.” He continued his education at Georgia Tech, where he took an introductory sequence very similar to Brown’s CS17/18 now. The trajectory of these courses is unusual, exposing the students to functional programming through unpopular languages first and then transitioning into the more mainstream languages, such as Java, rather than jumping into the popular object-oriented programming (OOP) straightaway.

Functional programming refers to the style of coding that treats the procedures to be carried out by the computer as mathematical functions. As a result, only the inputs and outputs of the computation are recognized, not the state of the program. On the other hand, OOP utilizes a data type called “objects,” which contains both data and code of instructions. In other words, with OOP, programmers can create more complex programs that model the real world.

Prof. Hays attributes incoming freshmen's programming proficiency to online learning environments like Codecademy. [image via]

However, he noted the general change in the scene of computer science students from his college days to now. He described the freshmen to be very self-motivated and proficient in programming, especially with the widely available self-education opportunities, such as Codeacademy. He remembered a specific time when a student asked in class, “Are the arguments passed by reference or passed by value?” This question caught him by surprise, as it is not what someone with no programming experience would say. He added that though both Georgia Tech and Brown have talented and capable students, Brown students carry a unique feel—the students taking the CS classes, whether potential concentrators or not, are genuinely interested in the subject. 

As an intended CS concentrator at Brown University, I empathize with his statement. Brown provides a distinctive, open academic setting for students to explore and pursue their passions; in light of the recent worldwide expansion of the field of computer science, CS at Brown clearly reflects the true advantages of the university’s curriculum.

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