As part of a multiyear initiative, the Allen School reimagined the introduction to programming course series with the goal of better serving the widest range of students across the University of Washington. Since its launch in 2022, CSE 121, 122 and 123, collectively known as the CSE 12X series, have enrolled thousands of students each year, serving as a gateway into computer science and as an essential part of UW’s general education for the entire campus.
Building a new course series from the ground up was no small feat, but a herculean team effort from many people in the Allen School. The nominated team – lecturer Kasey Champion and professors Elba Garza, Miya Natsuhara, Hunter Schafer and Brett Wortzman – had central roles, including co-teaching the pilot offerings of the courses.
The UW recognized the team behind this transformation with this year’s Distinguished Team Teaching Award as part of the 2025 Awards of Excellence — one of the University’s highest honors, recognizing outstanding alumni, faculty, staff, students and retirees whose achievements support the UW mission.
“We are thrilled to see our hard work recognized, and I hope we can keep doing what we’re doing: creating a welcoming environment where students of all computing backgrounds and experiences can thrive,” Wortzman said.
Changing directions
Prior to the CSE 12X series, UW students interested in computer programming would take CSE 142 and CSE 143. These popular courses sparked many students’ interest in computer science, including Natsuhara, who went on to become a teaching assistant (TA) for them.
But after many years since its introduction in 2004, it was time for a change.
The previous courses were designed during a time when few students came to the UW with any programming experience. Over the years, however, more students had access to computing classes in high school such as Advanced Placement classes, and the experience level of the students coming into the introductory courses started to vary. At the same time, the field itself had changed. Computer science is a fast growing field, and over two decades, new methods for teaching programming had emerged.
“It’s important for our curriculum in general to be reviewed every so often to make sure that we’re keeping up with things in terms of content and what kind of teaching is effective,” Wortzman said. “The student population was also changing, and it was time to respond to that.”
The new CSE 12X series design included a number of fundamental changes — starting from the top. Instead of two introductory classes, the material is spread across a sequence of three courses, and students can start at whichever one they feel comfortable in. To help students choose, the team created a guided self-placement tool. The tool is not an exam; it asks students to describe their confidence with various programming topics, test out some sample problems (and see the answers) and then recommends which course would be right for them.
So far, the course recommendations have been helpful. Across the Winter, Spring and Autumn 2024 quarters, only 3% of students switched from one course in the sequence to another.
“One of the goals was to offer more points of entry,” said Natsuhara, who received her bachelor’s degree in 2018 and her master’s degree in 2020 both from the Allen School. “It’s created a healthier learning environment, especially for the CSE 121 course. I don’t want students who have never programmed before to feel intimidated that their classmates are talking about the Python apps they’ve coded. Now, those more advanced students can skip ahead in the sequence and everyone is more likely to be around others at the same experience level.”
In the classroom
The team also updated the structure of the courses themselves. Each four-unit course now features two lectures and two sections guided by TAs per week, compared to three lectures in the previous sequence. With this format, each section only covers the previous lecture’s material, so TAs do not have to rush through topics from multiple lectures. Professors introduce new concepts in lectures, and these smaller sections give students the supportive space for practicing problems, which is “where the real learning happens,” Wortzman noted.
In addition, lectures are paired with short pre-class materials that introduce key concepts and provide practice with the new topics. This pre-work, which should take students about 30 minutes to complete, allows professors to use class time for answering questions, running activities and discussing more advanced applications.
By spreading out the content over three quarters, it gave lecturers the time and space to explicitly teach students important skills such as how to debug and fix problems with their code. Previously, students were expected to either know those skills implicitly or learn it on their own time, Natsuhara explained.
The team revamped the curriculum to reflect not just the variety of student skill levels, but also intended majors. In Autumn 2024, for example, students from more than 70 majors enrolled in one of the CSE 12X courses. Instead of having students learn by solving traditional programming puzzles, the team wanted to appeal to this broad range of student interests by highlighting how programming can be used to solve real-world problems across different disciplines.
One of Natsuhara’s favorite assignments asks students to implement an algorithm that prioritizes patients in an emergency room based on factors such as age, pain level or insurance status. Despite being well-intentioned, the algorithm is intentionally flawed and does not treat patients equitably. Each assignment has a reflection component asking students to grapple with how that algorithm made them feel, how it could be improved and what are some of the unintended consequences.
Other assignments follow similar veins including implementing algorithms for allocating disaster relief, generating computer-based election forecasts or identifying trends in social media posts.
“We’re helping our students wrestle with the idea that programming and computer science is not an amoral field — there are moral and ethical implications for these things and we should care about them,” Wortzman said.
The team also updated their grading policies to help students master the material. First, instead of starting at 100% and deducting points for inaccuracies like in traditional grading, the courses use mastery grading concepts such as coarse-grained evaluations that assess students on how well they demonstrate their understanding of the key ideas. Second, students are able to learn from their mistakes and resubmit assignments for an updated grade. This system incentivizes students to keep learning and working because “learning does not stop once an assignment is turned in,” Wortzman explained.
These policies have already helped students find success in their courses. During the 2023 calendar year, only about 1% of students in a CSE 12X course were retaking the class compared to almost 8% in 2018 under the previous CSE 14X series.
After the team built the new introductory series — course structure, curriculum and even grading policies — from the ground up, they expected some pushback or major bumps in the road. The rollout, however, “appeared amazingly smooth,” said Dan Grossman, Allen School professor and vice director.
“The nominated team members acted as shock absorbers, and the fact that the new course rollout was such a success and felt so smooth is a great testament to what they pulled off and how hard it was,” Grossman said.
However, none of these efforts would be possible without the help of the TA community and countless others supporting the course instructors and participating in the design. This project was also supported by funding from the Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) at Northeastern University.
“The task of launching the new courses was enormous, and we could not have done it without the massive army of undergraduate TAs that helped us put it together and keep it running to this day,” Natsuhara said. “We leaned on TAs and gave them more autonomy and responsibilities than we have previously done, and they stepped up in a really big way. We are still making iterations and improvements to the courses, and their continuous work deserves recognition as well.”
Natsuhara is not the only alum on the team; her colleague Schafer earned both his bachelor’s and master’s in computer science from the Allen School in 2016 and 2018, respectively.
Other members of the Allen School community were also nominated for this year’s UW Awards of Excellence. For the Distinguished Staff Award, fiscal specialists Emily Miller and Bree Siegel were nominated for their work in payroll, senior grants manager Stephanie McConnel was nominated as a member of the Collaborative for Research Education (CORE) training team and Vani Mandava, head of engineering for the UW’s Scientific Software Engineering Center in the eScience Institute, was nominated as part of the Post-award Dashboard Team. Director of Information Technology Aaron Timss was also nominated in the Career Achievement category, recognizing individuals for their demonstrated excellence throughout their years of service to the UW.
Read more about the 2025 UW Distinguished Team Teaching Award.