NOTE: This post is a component of a larger reflection blog post on my time as an instructor for CMU's 15-150 Principles of Functional Programming course. That blog post can be found here.
Designing a course from scratch is a lot of effort. It involves creating a itinerary of topics, a comprehensive narrative that drives the material, homework assignments that will be challenging enough to nurture students' growth while remaining feasible, and a great deal of investment into each individual student.
Thankfully, this blog post is not about that. Having finished my stint as a summer instructor for 15-150, the introductory functional programming class at CMU, I was able to work off of course material that had already been taught for years. There was no need for me to design a whole curriculum from scratch.
But, even though the pure information content of the course was predetermined, an important lesson that we derive from the film Megamind is that there is one aspect which separates an instructor from a super-instructor:
With information comes the presentation of that information, and with presentation comes stylistic choices. With those comes a whole other world of issues and challenges, because information may be immutable, but how it is conveyed to someone can make a world of difference in how it is retained, remembered, and understood.
This blog post is about designing a course, in the sense of artistic design. It's an exploration of how, over twelve weeks and months of preparation, I attempted to create a comprehensive style that could not just present material to students, but engage their attention fully, primarily through the creation of visual content for students to refer back to in the form of slides.