Joseph G. Politz
Faculty, Computer Science and Engineering
Computer science education, programming languages, compiler design, web programming, and web security.
Joe Gibbs Politz does research in computer science education, programming languages, compiler design, web programming, and web security.
As a computer science educator, he wants students to reflect on all the artifacts that are part of a program beyond its implementation – tests, specifications, documentation, types, user interfaces, performance, and more. He has studied peer code review, specifically of example test cases, as a mechanism for having students explore computational problems through a different lens than their implementations.
As a programming languages and compilers practitioner, he designed, and continues ongoing development of, the Pyret programming language (https://www.pyret.org). Pyret is the language of choice for several curriculum efforts from the middle school to undergraduate levels, and for the textbook Programming and Programming Languages.
As part of the Bootstrap (bootstrapworld.org) curricular outreach effort, he designs Pyret to serve courses, teachers, and students outside of pure computer science. By bringing programming ideas to courses like math and physics at the middle and high school level, he aims to reach a broader base of students with computer science topics.
Capsule Bio:
Joe Gibbs Politz joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2016. He worked previously as a visiting instructor at Swarthmore College. He received his PhD in computer science from Brown University in May 2016, and his B.S. in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic nstitute in 2009. He has also worked on web security at Google through software engineering internships.
