Well, I just finished my last lecture for the quantum computing class I taught this summer. Now all I have to do is grade the final and submit grades. The class started roughly, with me going too fast, then things smoothed out, and then a tough homework hit, and then things sped up again. Not what I was shooting for, but, well, live and learn. I would say that I am 60 percent happy with the way the class went: i.e. I’d give myself a D.
What would I do different? Lots of things. One is that I might try to teach the course along with one of the quantum simulator programs. These are, after all, professional masters students in a computer science program. This means that the majority are programmers. And programmers, well they like to learn by programming. So I think I would teach it that way for this particular audience.
I have to teach a quantum course in Italy to graduate students in computer science coming up in a few weeks. The course will have twelve hours of lectures and a two hour final examination. How do you talk about quantum computation in twelve hours? Four hours to introduce quantum theory, four hours to build up to quantum algorithms, two hours for quantum error correction, and two hours for quantum cryptography? Or is it better to do more surveying of results? It’s an interesting question and one I’ll be struggling with for the next week.
O brave new quantum world!
I think you are selling yourself way short Dave. Although, I admit it was a bit technical to begin with, you definitly redeemed yourself with the remainder of the course. By the end I felt like a Quantum Master and was ready to take a trip to Radio Shack to get the parts to build my PQC (personal quantum computer). You were able to keep my attention during the 3 hour lecture which is a rare occurence :). Doing a programming assignment would have been an added bonus, but the homeworks were well written and actually fun to do in some cases (except when calculating 32 measurements :)). This course was very interesting and makes me even more curious about physics and quantum computing now. I can’t wait for Quantum Computing 2: Revenge of the Qubit!
(I’ll remain anonymous so as to not influence the grading of my final.)