Bio

Phill Conrad joined the faculty of the CS Department in January 2008, and in July 2012 was promoted to Lecturer (SOE), a career-oriented position focusing on undergraduate education.  Dr. Conrad's focus is the lower-division curriculum, and he is the faculty undergraduate advisor for CS majors.   Dr. Conrad has a 50% appointment in UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, whose mission is promoting research and creative activity as part of an undergraduate degree program in one of eight majors (including CS).  Dr. Conrad has also served on the Computer Science faculty of the University of Delaware, and Temple University.

Research

I am currently focused on finding better ways to promote and measure learning in lower-division CS courses, software development courses, and courses in discrete math for computer science.   I am also interested in helping to find ways for Computer Science to have a place at the table in Middle School and High School classrooms.

I am currently partnering with Danielle Harlow of UCSB’s Gervitz Graduate School of Education, and with teachers at the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy on further developing the Computer Science portion of the DPEA curriculum.

I have also been a participant in a multi-year, multi-institution study of Studio-Based Learning (studiobasedlearning.org) that has been exploring ways to promote design, communication, and collaborative work skills in the context of Computer Science courses, by adapting techniques from Art and Architecture education.

An outgrowth of this work was an emphasis on studying the role that legacy code projects can play in software development courses.

Finally, I am also collaborating with several students on software to automatically generate practice problems for intro programming and discrete math courses. (http://pconrad.github.io/AwesomePrelims/).

Honors and Awards

• Faculty Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, 2011
• Outstanding Faculty Member, Computer Science (chosen by graduating senior undergrads) 2012, 2013

Publications