Powen Yao 姚博文

Powen Yao 姚博文

Computer Science Ph.D. at the intersection of spatial user interface, games, and innovation

Teaching



Teaching Style

Students doing Marshmallow Challenge as part of the in-class exercise.
Students taking part of the Marshmallow Challenge that I championed to include in the class. See the accompanying slides Marshmallow Challenge on its relevance to the class

My lectures are designed to be 30 to 50 minutes in length.

My presentation slides minimize the use of long paragraphs and texts. Emphasis is placed on having one central idea in each slide, with visuals when possible.

A typical 50-minute lecture may make use of 100+ slides. For example, my Game Genres & Innovation lecture , designed for a class that is 3 hours in length, is roughly 178 slides and delivered over the course of 90 minutes. It can alternatively be delivered as two part lectures to accomodate for 50-minute classes.

In-class exercises (ICE) are used during or after the lecture to provide timely opportunities for students to put what they are learning into practice.

Statements

  • Teaching Statement
  • DEI Statement
  • Research Statement
  • Selected Research and Creative Work

Courses

While I can teach a variety of classes, I have the most experience in teaching project-based classes. The project-based classes are designed to be composed of 5 modules. I am interested in teaching areas such as Extended Reality, Game Design, Game Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Computer Interaction.

In particular, I am interested in teaching the following courses in each area

Teaching Experience

As a teaching assistant, I have done the grunt work as well as the work of instructors of giving lectures, course planning, creating the syllabus and lessons, and restructuring classes. Of recent, I regularly give lectures to a class of 90 students and work with masters students that serve as course producers and graders to ensure the class is running smoothly and always improving. Below is a retrospective of my time at USC and how each time period how shaped the way I teach now.

Teaching Assistant 2012-2014 - Advanced Game Projects, Free to Play Game Development

Graduate course, University of Southern California, Department of Computer Science, 2012

AGP is the capstone and perhaps the most important class at USC Games. While detrimental to graduating on time, I dedicated my first two years of PhD to doing what I can to improve AGP and games program at USC. I did a lot, messed up a lot, and learned a lot. I look forward to doing something like this again (but better).