Yana Malysheva

Email: kuziavra (at) gmail.com

Education

Washington University in St. Louis 2018-present

PhD in Computer Science and Engineering

  • Focus: HCI, CS Education
  • Recipient of Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship
  • Maintaining 4.0 GPA
  • Member of Studio TESLA Enrichment team: we develop engaging STEM projects for minority, underrepresented, and low-income middle school students.
  • Acted as Assistant in Instruction for one semester of CSE 256A: Introduction to Human-Centered Design
  • Acted as a Teaching Assistant for one semester of CSE425S: Programming Systems and Languages

Rochester Institute of Technology 2010-2012

Master's in Game Design and Development

  • Concentration: Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Design
  • Capstone Project: Micro Missions, a procedural story-based mini-game adventure
    • Presented research portion of capstone at IGIC 2012

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2004-2006

Master’s in Applied Mathematics

  • Concentration: Optimization and Algorithms

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2001-2004

BS in Math and Computer Science

  • Participated in illiMath REU after freshman year
Work Experience

Google June 2012-August 2018

Worked as a Site Reliability Engineer for Google's storage systems for two years, then as a Software Engineer on a Search Analysis team, then on a coding education app as a "co-founder of an internal start-up". Designed the general teaching structure for the app - a series of puzzles, with each one introducing a new concept, and just-in-time feedback within the puzzles - designed most of the initial curriculum, and outlined the structure for the subsequent courses. Presented some of this work at the Blocks & Beyond Conference.
Throughout my Google career, I've taken part in many education-related side projects, including:
  • Pencil Code(pencilcode.net) - an open-source web-based educational IDE which incorporates turtle graphics and block code to teach real-world languages and technologies (JS, CoffeeScript, HTML, CSS). Led the design of a modular 10-week curriculum and developed various additional educational content(puzzles, games, code samples, video tutorials).
  • Computer Science Summer Institute - taught HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to a group of 30 rising college freshmen from underrepresented minorities. Modified the existing curriculum to integrate JS with HTML immediately, instead of teaching the CS theory first and merging the two later.
  • Google In Residence - Went on two separate one-semester (full-time) rotation, teaching CS courses to students at HBCUs.
    • taught an Intro to CS course and an advanced seminar at Hampton University in Fall 2014
    • taught Web Development at Dillard University in Spring 2017, and designed a hands-on curriculum with a companion web app, which the students first used as a learning tool and then contributed code to.
    • Developed a mini-curriculum for an interview training workshop series.
  • Oppia(oppia.org) - an open-source platform for creating interactive educational content. Participated in early design and implementation. Made sample content of varying length and complexity, created design guidelines for other content creators, drafted design documents for community-building social features.
  • Citizen Schools - taught 4 semesters of programming classes, starting with the Bootstrap curriculum and then designing new Scratch- and Pencil Code-based curricula. Our students' final presentations were consistently popular with audiences of engineers, and students were extremely excited about programming.
  • Various other formal and informal mentorship programs, including mock interviews, curriculum design, and one-off panels and workshops.

RITResearch and Teaching assistant - 2010-2012

Found ways to emulate really old games for the Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 project - a collaboration between several universities and the Library of Congress to preserve classical game experiences.
Helped conduct playtests of educational games, and later encode recordings of these playtests for research on the effect of the game on student understanding of physics.
Taught and tutored students in topics ranging from introductory programming to game physics and game AI.
Taught several one-off children's CS classes using various tools, including Scratch, PicoCrickets, and CS Unplugged.

iD Tech CampsInstructor - summers 2010-2011

Taught C++ and Java to campers ages 10-17. Conducted 8-10 week-long programming courses per summer. Iterated heavily on the introductory programming curriculum, and formed a good basis of understanding of how different people learn to program. Got consistent strong positive feedback about my teaching style from both students and fellow instructors.

RSIS/HPTi Programmer - 2006-2010

Worked as a contractor for the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory(GFDL). Processed data from climate models, assisted with custom post-processing and analyses, developed and supported a web-based data portal.
Publications
Malysheva, Yana, and Caitlin Kelleher. "An Algorithm for Generating Explainable Corrections to Student Code." Proceedings of the 22nd Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research. 2022.
Malysheva, Yana, John Allen, and Caitlin Kelleher. "How Do Teaching Assistants Teach? Characterizing the Interactions Between Students and TAs in a Computer Science Course." 2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). IEEE, 2022. (Honorable Mention award)
Malysheva, Yana, and Caitlin Kelleher. "Assisting Teaching Assistants with Automatic Code Corrections." Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2022.
Malysheva, Yana, and Caitlin Kelleher. "Using Bugs in Student Code to Predict Need for Help." 2020 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). IEEE, 2020.
Malysheva, Yana, and Caitlin Kelleher. "Bugs as Features: Describing Patterns in Student Code through a Classification of Bugs." Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2020.
Malysheva, Yana, and Caitlin Kelleher. "Puzzle Solving as Debugging." 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). IEEE, 2019. (Best Poster award)