Zilles Receives Student Senate Teaching Excellence Award

4/24/2013

CS prof receives teaching award

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CS Associate Professor Craig Zilles was one of five recipients of the 2013 Illinois Student Senate Teaching Excellence Award. More than 615 nominations were received for this year’s recognition.

CS Associate Professor Craig Zilles was a recipient of the 2013 Illinois Student Senate Teaching Excellence Award.
CS Associate Professor Craig Zilles was a recipient of the 2013 Illinois Student Senate Teaching Excellence Award.
CS Associate Professor Craig Zilles was a recipient of the 2013 Illinois Student Senate Teaching Excellence Award.

“I had no idea I was even nominated,” said Zilles. “I value teaching, and to be recognized this way is exciting.”

Zilles felt particularly gratified that he received this award this year because this past fall the a two-course computer architecture sequence was converted to a single four-unit course, offered with the temporary number CS 398: Computer Architecture. Not only does this new course move quickly to cover the required material, but due to timing issues of launching this course, the inaugural offering ended up with twice its typical number of students.

As Zilles explained, “whenever you do something new, and especially with that many students, to have students appreciate the effort we put into that—I was excited and a little surprised to receive this award at this time.”

For Zilles, the fact that his computer architecture class is a required course makes his job a little bit more difficult. He feels he has to work to make students interested in the subject matter. “They weren’t born with the desire to take my class,” he said. “If they understand what’s cool about this stuff I’m telling them, they’re more likely to go and learn it.”

By all accounts, his efforts were appreciated. CS freshman Purajit Malalur, who took CS 398 with Zilles last semester, said, “I think he designed the class really well, and it was really taught well. He’s very active in class, and he keeps students involved by asking them questions.”

Zilles said, “I like teaching at Illinois because we have great undergrads, and by teaching one of our large classes here, I get to share my excitement about computer architecture with a lot of students.”

Zilles tries to keep students more engaged through a contest called SPIMbot. Students write programs that control a virtual robot to accomplish some task in a virtual world, and at the end of the semester, their programs compete in a double elimination tournament, akin to the March Madness college basketball tournament. The contest enables students to take code they’ve written for class assignments, extend and improve the code, and develop a simple artificial intelligence to play the game. “It’s kind of a neat thing, and it gives a fun context for some of the things they’ve learned,” said Zilles. “Students really enjoy this.”

This is not the first time that Zilles has been recognized for excellence in teaching. The College of Engineering awarded him the Rose Award for Teaching Excellence in 2007 and the Everitt Teaching Award in 2008. He also received the Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award from the IEEE Education Society in 2010.

The Illinois Student Senate awards five Teaching Excellence Awards every year. This year’s other recipients include Michael Donohoe (College of Business), Michael LeRoy (School of Labor and Employment Relations), Jermaine Martinez (College of LAS), and Ryan Rafferty (College of LAS). A banquet honoring this year’s recipients was held April 7.


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This story was published April 24, 2013.