I am Sam! π I'm an Assistant
Teaching Professor in the HalΔ±cΔ±oΔlu Data Science Institute at UC San
Diego. I use methods from human-computer interaction (HCI) to design
software tools like
Pandas Tutor
that help programming, statistics, and data science instructors prepare
their lessons. I also wrote a textbook called
Learning Data Science, published by O'Reilly Media in 2023.
My teaching faculty application materials for the 2022-2023 application
cycle are linked below.
CV
β
Teaching Statement β
Research Statement β
Diversity Statement
projects
teaching
UC San Diego
UC Berkeley
-
Data 100: Principles and Techniques of Data Science
Instructor: 19su (first summer offering)
-
Data 8: Foundations of Data Science
Instructor: 17su (first summer offering)
papers
βIβm not sure, but...β: Expert Practices that Enable Effective Code Comprehension in Data Science.
ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE),
2025.
How Novices Use Program Visualizations to Understand Code that Manipulates Data Tables.
ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE),
2025.
From "Ban It Till We Understand It" to "Resistance is Futile": How University Programming Instructors Plan to Adapt as More Students Use AI Code Generation and Explanation Tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot.
ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER),
2023.
Teaching Data Science by Visualizing Data Table Transformations: Pandas Tutor for Python, Tidy Data Tutor for R, and SQL Tutor.
International Workshop on Data Systems Education (DataEd),
2023.
Codehound: Helping Instructors Track Pedagogical Code Dependencies in Course Materials.
ACM SIGPLAN SPLASH-E Symposium (SPLASH-E),
2022.
The Challenges of Evolving Technical Courses at Scale: Four Case Studies of Updating Large Data Science Courses.
ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S),
2022.
How Computer Science and Statistics Instructors Approach Data Science Pedagogy Differently: Three Case Studies.
ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE),
2022.
TweakIt: Supporting End-User Programmers Who Transmogrify Code.
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI),
2021.
The Design Space of Computational Notebooks: An Analysis of 60 Systems in Academia and Industry.
IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC),
2020.
workshop and poster papers
Data Theater: A Live Programming Environment for Prototyping Data-Driven Explorable Explanations.
Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE),
2020.
Experiment Reconstruction Reduces Fixation on Surface Details of Explanations.
Poster in ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C),
2019.