Terry Harvey

Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Delaware

While teaching Scottish dancing classes, Terry would set goals, prepare lessons, move around the classroom and focus on delivering the same lesson in multiple ways. He would later realise, with much excitement, that these same principles carried over to the teaching of computer science to college students.

Terry grew up across much of the US eastern coast and wasn’t quite sure where he wanted to take his career. Looking through a catalogue of majors after finishing secondary school, he joked that his main objective was to find something that would “let him work somewhere where there was air conditioning”. He decided on an undergraduate degree in marketing, and after completing this degree found himself in a management training program within a bank.

During the course of his undergraduate studies, Terry found a warm and welcoming local community of Scottish dancers. On multiple nights each week he would join this community and begin a long journey through the world of Scottish dance. He began teaching it only a few years later and has never looked back since. When working in the bank he knew he wanted to be somewhere else, but when dancing he was exactly where he felt at home.

He decided to refine his goals and make a change, this time around he was looking for something that would be different every day. The rapidly-changing field of artificial intelligence had caught his attention at the time, leading him to a graduate program at the University of Delaware.

It was a difficult transition to say the least. Everyone in this program had at least four years of computer science under their belt, while he had only a basic introduction to the programming language Pascal. Despite the challenges, he persevered. Part of the way through the program, his advisor needed someone to teach a Scheme programming course and offered the role to Terry. Though he loved teaching Scottish dancing, he never believed he would enjoy teaching computer science. He took it on reluctantly, thinking it could only serve to set him back with his goals. In reality, it would drive them forward in a way he couldn’t have imagined.

Terry had the realisation that whether he was teaching Scottish dancing or computer science didn’t matter, it was the lightbulb moments in a student’s eyes, those moments of realisation, that were truly rewarding for him. The value he had gained from years of teaching his art to others through technique and rhythm could not have been more apparent. Reading a room, determining who was struggling with what, finding different ways of expressing the same method or technique, these all could be comfortably carried over to the world of algorithms and data structures. He found it odd to walk into a computer science classroom and feel at home, but that’s exactly how it felt for him.

Terry emphasised that anyone can become a computer scientist, just as anyone can become a Scottish dancer. Both can surprise students in ways they didn’t realise. A large part of his job is to help people fall in love with what he’s teaching them, even if that wasn’t their original intention when entering the classroom.

He believes the field of computer science is just beginning to grapple with a much larger issue of diversity. His university has done well with bringing more women into computer science, but he believes they are still really struggling with other minority groups and need to push more towards this direction in the future.

He encourages the teaching of computer science to anyone and everyone from a younger age than third-level education. This is currently coming to fruition through a project he works with entitled Partner4CS, which aims to bring undergraduate students out into the community to help middle and high school teachers with computer science education.

Oftentimes, these teachers are far more comfortable with teaching other subjects than computer science, and therefore the support provided by undergraduate students is irreplaceable. This gives undergraduate students the opportunity to walk into a class where they’re looked up to and can really make a difference for young students, allowing them to discover things about themselves that may bring about a shift in their own perspective. Perhaps just as Terry found his perspective shift upon entering his own first computer science classroom.