About Me

I am a Professor of Teaching in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.

Teaching Interests

I am particularly interested in the use of technology in education. I designed and implemented one of the first flipped classrooms (APSC 160) to be taught in the Faculty of Science. To support pre-class learning a series of short screencasts was developed that not only present learners with raw information, but also provide an opportunity to learn in an interactive manner.

More recently I worked with Andrew Stec on the development of a Docker image that is used to grade labs and assignments in CPSC 210. The Docker image works in conjunction with the Classy auto-grader developed by Reid Holmes et al.

Favourite quote: To teach is to learn twice (Joubert)

Teaching philosophy: In general, the less talking I do in class, the better.

Research Interests

As a graduate student of Uri Ascher’s I worked on the application of multigrid techniques to the shape from shading problem in computer vision. The problem was modelled by a singularly perturbed elliptic partial differential equation. I continue to be interested in scientific computation.

Selected Publications

[1] Carter, P. (2012), An experience report: on the use of multimedia pre-instruction and just-in-time teaching in a CS1 course SIGCSE ‘12 Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education, 2012

[2] Carter, P. (2009), An experiment with online instruction and active learning in an introductory computing course for engineers: JiTT meets CS1 WCCCE ‘09 Proceedings of the 14th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, 2009

[3] Ascher, U. & Carter P. (1993), A Multigrid Method for Shape from Shading, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, February 1993.