EVL’s Andy Johnson was one of five recipients of the 2009 UIC Award for Excellence in Teaching. Nominated by the Computer Science department and College of Engineering, and peer-selected by those who received the award in past years, this UIC award rewards professors for their teaching, their curriculum and instructional materials, and the impact their research and service activities have on the classroom.

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10/7/09
Paul Francuch, UIC Public Affairs

Standing before a wall of ultra-thin, high-definition video panels stretching 20 feet wide at EVL - UIC’s treasure house of high-tech gadgets looking for new applications - Andy Johnson talks about how he’ll transform the cinema-like space into a prototype of the classroom of the future.

“It’s not just about teaching human-computer interaction, visualization and graphics programming,” says Johnson, associate professor of computer science.

“It’s about taking the traditional displays in a large lecture hall, several big blackboards filled with equations and diagrams which are needed to ‘tell the story’ to the class, and using this technology to give more capabilities to the students and the instructor.”

When Johnson and his students interact by using new technology, it’s not the usual, teacher-lectures-students-who-are-later-tested model.

“I usually devote several weeks of my courses to the students, presenting their work to the rest of the class,” he says, taking advantage of EVL’s long collaboration between the fields of computer science and graphic art.

“The art side regularly has critiques,” he says. “You present your work to others in the group, they comment on it, and you make improvements based on those comments. That’s something I don’t think computer scientists get enough of.”