Professor Kia Bazargan receives Charles E. Bowers Faculty Teaching Award

Professor Kia Bazargan dressed in white in front of a bookshelf

Professor Kia Bazargan was recently recognized with the Charles E. Bowers Faculty Teaching Award by the College of Science and Engineering (CSE) for his singular contributions to undergraduate and graduate education in ECE and CSE. The award recognizes an outstanding CSE professor who has demonstrated exceptional interest and commitment to teaching.

Bazargan’s commitment to his students has been inspirational and he has enriched their classroom and co-curricular experiences in multiple ways. As an instructor for EE 1301, “Introduction to Computing Systems,” a gateway course to the undergraduate programs offered by ECE, he has revolutionized the lab component that accompanies the course. He has adopted online resources to strengthen student learning. To facilitate better understanding of abstract concepts, Bazargan has developed web-based tools to help students visualize them.

As Director of the college-wide co-op program, a responsibility he took on in August 2021, he has revitalized the two required courses that support students in the program: CSE 4896 and 4996. As part of the revamping, he has integrated leading-edge technical and business skills so our students are well-prepared with skills relevant to professional practice. The updates introduced by Bazargan have earned high praise from both students as well as the program’s industry partners, and the latter’s participation in the program has increased by more than fifty percent over the last three years.

Bazargan’s dedication to teaching at the graduate level is equally, if not more laudable. The course EE 5301 (VLSI Design Automation) is a popular choice among graduate students in the program seeking a career in electronic design. Students point to his class as the reason for choosing a career in design automation and discovering their passion for programming. Beyond the classroom, leading companies such as Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others have referred to the course as a key reason for hiring our graduate students.

An engaged, innovative, and patient educator, Bazargan incites intellectual growth in his students by supporting them through frequent meetings, through projects that build up progressively, and encouraging critical thinking. He has built and sustained an interactive learning environment in the classroom and beyond so that students can build theoretical knowledge and gain valuable practical experience.

Bazargan reflects on the recognition of his work:

I am really grateful that I have been given opportunities to have a positive impact on the lives of our students, and also work with a great team, my colleagues at CSE Career Services on the co-op program: Kristen Murphy, Sam Tiemens-Anderson, and Angie Froistad, my colleague Professor David Orser (ECE), and all my amazing teaching assistants (TAs), especially Nishanth S. Murthy, Ike Goetzman, Danyal Falsafi, and Kaizen Haque, who were always willing to go the extra mile to help out students.

I am also both excited and scared of the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on our education. I had the privilege of teaching EE1301 “Intro to Computing” with an enrollment of 230 students. Using AI tools (mostly provided by the online book zyBooks) and scripts that my TA and I wrote, we could analyze students’ coding behavior and detect early on if they needed help. For example, on the first few assignments, I looked at how long it took each student to finish each problem, and what their coding behavior was: too much deleting and rewriting? Linear thinking? Copy/pasting? For the 10-20% of the students who took the longest, I looked more closely at the history of their work – I could see, keystroke by keystroke what they had typed and its timestamp – and see their thinking process. Then I invited them to have one-on-one meetings – some of which took as long as two hours – going over basic concepts that they had missed, or the problem-solving techniques they could use to write code faster.

This is an amazing capability that was not available five years ago. The bottom 10-20 percent of the class would have given up, lost their confidence, and most importantly, not discovered their latent talents. If we can help them at the beginning of the semester, we could potentially change their career path. That does not mean technology is a panacea. Now that we can analyze students’ coding skills, we need one-on-one interactions with people like them who can relate to their way of thinking. I really wish I had a large number of undergraduate TAs who could hold online office hours and solve problems for students in smaller groups. The funds needed to support ten undergrad TAs would be only about $30K, but the impact on students’ learning would be huge. I, like many others, don’t know where exactly we are going with the new technology, but I am excited about looking into the possibilities and making dramatic changes to the way we teach our students.

Kia Bazargan was awarded his doctoral degree by Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois in 2000. He joined the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in August of the same year as a faculty member in ECE. He is also Leroy and Ruth Fingerson Co-op Professor and Director of the Co-op Program in the College of Science and Engineering.

Professor Kia Bazargan receives Charles E. Bowers Faculty Teaching Award

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