Teaching, and education more broadly construed, are central to my past, present, and future activities. Teaching, or what one does in a classroom, is something I take quite seriously. In 1995, I received MIT's Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award. But my interests are broader than that, and other work I have done in curricular innovation -- educational activities beyond my own instruction -- has received international recognition. In the future, I intend to pursue my own teaching as well as broader educational activities with the tremendous enthusiasm that they deserve.

I have been involved in university instruction for almost two decades. Most of that teaching has been at MIT, and much of it has been in introductory computer science and computer programming, including a course and curriculum of my own design. My other undergraduate teaching experiences include subjects as diverse as analog circuits, computer architecture, and introductory robotics. I am, as this list will attest, comfortable teaching broadly and would be happy to teach undergraduate courses in data structures, algorithms, mathematical foundations, or artificial intelligence, as well as the above subjects.

I have also taught at the graduate and professional levels, including graduate seminars on subjects ranging from robotics to foundations of AI and professional short courses for business executives and for software engineers.

Beyond the classroom, I have been involved in curricular reform and innovation in a variety of venues. As a member of the MIT EECS Department's Core Curriculum Committee, I performed an extensive review of the combined EE and CS core curriculum and recommended a major redesign of those courses. I have also served on the MIT EECS department's Professional Education Policy Committee, which administers the five-year first professional (MEng) degree. More broadly, I am a member of the ACM/IEEE Computer Society’s Curriculum 2001 Review Committee and a member the Intelligent Systems task force and the focus group on the First Year.

I have developed and implemented an innovative curriculum for introductory computer programming. This course, embodied in a textbook (to be published by Morgan Kaufmann, 2000, after a multi-publisher competition) and web site, has "changed the terms of the debate" over what ought to be taught in introductory computer science. It brings the kind of interactive, concurrent, distributed approaches common in today's software industry to first-semester freshmen with no prior programming experience. Students who complete this curriculum are better prepared for research and employment opportunities and more able to appreciate the rest of the computer science curriculum in context.

This work has received international attention and is currently in classroom testing around the world. It has received financial and in-kind support from Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and most recently from the National Science Foundation.

The Rethinking CS101 innovations address a more conventional Computer Science curriculum. They are motivated both by my research and by earlier curricular innovations involving inexpensive robotics and hands-on design. At MIT, I taught a freshman advisor seminar---the ``Robot Building Collaborative''---in which first-semester freshmen built simple robots as a way of exploring ideas in mechanical, electrical, and software engineering. This activity resulted in several continuing robotics-based activities at MIT's Edgerton Center including an ongoing Lego robotics club.

At the opposite end of the audience spectrum, I organized and taught a mini-course on robotics for AI educators and professionals at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This three-day intensive laboratory exposed seventy-five researchers, faculty, and students from a variety of national and international sites to technologies for simple robotics. The lab was extremely successful and has subsequently become an annual event at the conference. As a direct result of the first lab, a number of universities have adopted related technology in teaching undergraduate AI and robotics.

I take my role as a mentor and advisor seriously and have developed something of a reputation around MIT as a source of support and guidance for students from their freshman year through the graduate program. Although I have a special interest in the ways that female students in particular approach computer science, I believe that my efforts have made significant differences in the lives of a wide range of students from diverse backgrounds and with varying needs.

I have also been involved in more formal efforts to support students on their way through the university and the computer science program. These include orientation activities, student seminars, panels and training meetings on topics such as finding a research topic, balancing career and family, or reading technical papers as well as more purely social community-building activities.