About

Luther Tychonievich began at Illinois in August 2022 after spending 9 years as a teaching faculty member at the University of Virginia. His primary academic activity is education, focusing on teaching students, teaching assistants, faculty, and computer science educators at every level. He has taught across the computer science curriculum, including courses in computer organization, data structures, discrete mathematics, graphics, programming, software development, and theory of computation. Additionally, he teaches about equity and inclusion, active recruiting, inclusive pedagogy, stereotype threat, assessment, tutoring, and teaching methods. Luther has received recognition for his teaching, including the 2017 Harold S. Morton Jr Award for Teaching and the UVA ACM student chapter's Professor of the Year award in 2015 and 2019. He currently serves as Illinois CS's Associate Director for Undergraduate Programs, chairs the Undergrad CS Outcomes & Curriculum Review Committee, and is a member of the Teaching Improvement and Evaluation Committee. He has also held roles such as co-chair of the Teaching Improvement and Evaluation Committee, Director for Academic Data, and chair of the Broadening Participation in Computing Data subcommittee. Beyond his academic roles, Luther is active in family history data standards, serving on the steering committee for the GEDCOM data standard, and has held leadership positions in related organizations. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Virginia, along with M.S. and B.S. degrees from Brigham Young University, and A.A. and A.S. degrees from Lakeland Community College. As a community college alumnus, he advocates for community colleges and the community college to university pipeline.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Mathematics education
• Pedagogy
• Medical education
• Programming language
• Engineering management
• Medicine
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Effective DEI Committees: Sharing and Refining Key Practices

  2024-03-14

  articleSenior author

  This workshop is intended for faculty, staff, and students engaged in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work within their institution. It will build on participants' experiences in other collaborative or committee-based work and on participants' experiences with DEI. The goal of the workshop is for attendees to learn, both from the organizers and from one another, key practices for leading effective DEI activities and committees. To facilitate this discussion, the facilitators will provide a list of ten challenges faced by DEI committees: (1) recruiting and motivating contributors, (2) training contributors, (3) working with narrowly focused committee members, (4) responding to department members who resist DEI, (5) prioritizing DEI activities, (6) discovering problem situations, (7) responding to problem situations, (8) navigating power dynamics, (9) operating within legal and political constraints, and (10) running effective meetings. Participants will be invited to identify other challenges as well.

  PublisherDOI

• Selecting BPC Activities: Discussion of the Feasibility, Relevance, and Sustainability of 60+ Activities from BPCnet.org

  2024-03-14

  articleSenior author

  This session will help attendees interested in broadening participation in computing (BPC) select specific BPC activities to engage in, either individually or as a group or department. Attendees will be provided with a list of more than 60 BPC activities and will participate in a guided discussion to help select those best suited to them. Topics of discussion will be introduced by the session organizers, discussed in small groups, and then summary points will be shared with all attendees. The guided topic prompts will cover (1) how each activity contributes to BPC; (2) the expected feasibility, impact, and relevance of activities and how to prioritize them; (3) methods of sustaining activities for long enough to see results; and (4) next steps, including implementing activities and incorporating them into departmental BPC plans. At the end of the session, each attendee will have selected multiple BPC activities suited to their goals and institution and have developed their ability to analyze BPC activities along several axes and anticipate how best to sustain them.

  PublisherDOI

• Experiences with a Hardware Description Language for a CS-major's Computer Organization Course

  2023-10-18

  articleSenior author

  This article presents a novel hardware description language (HDL) and associated 4-week assignment sequence for a computer architecture course, with discussion of our experience developing and using these tools. At our institution, CS majors take a different computer architecture course than computer engineering majors. The CS majors' course aims to providestudents with an understanding of how nontrivial processors can be built out of simple hardware components. To leverage students' existing familiarity with programming languages, we wanted students to manipulate processor designs using a text-based hardware description language (HDL). We did not, however, want to devote instructional time to the low level complexities like clocking choices or arithmetic logic design. We developed an instructional hardware description language and associated assignments based on Bryant & O'Halleron's HCL (and designed to be compatible with their text) with some inspiration from Verilog. Unlike HCL, our HDL allows students with flexibility to build and simulate different processor organizations - for example, pipeline designs with different pipeline stages as well as non-pipelined designs - without the differences being hidden in the internal components of the simulator. By specializing for building a processor, our tooling prominently to students and our testing infrastructure how their simulated processors executed programs. Also, using simple enforcement of signal widths and avoiding floating or undefined values, our HDL design helped catch many students errors while still seeming to treat all values as bits. We also discuss our experience teaching a course using these tools to several hundred students a semester for the last eight years.We evaluate our experience through a review of student and instructor feedback, which suggest increased student and instructor satisfaction and that the HDL and assignments provide a solid basis for explaining later topics such as superscalar processors and processor-aware software optimization.

  PublisherDOI

• Departmental BPC Plans 1 - Getting Started

  2022-03-01

  articleSenior author

  A hands-on session for creating department-level plans to coordinate Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) work. Departmental BPC Plans can help provide continuity and greater impact in BPC work and provide opportunities for more faculty to engage. The workshop is organized around a series of guided hands-on activities selecting and refining specific goals and activities with the final result being an outline of a full BPC plan. We also include some discussion of next steps and invite participants to join our active Slack workspace. Individuals interested in this workshop may also be interested in the follow-on workshop, Departmental BPC Plans 2 - Finalizing your Plan.

  PublisherDOI

• How and Why to Create a Departmental BPC Plan

  Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 · 2022-02-23

  articleSenior author

  Broadening participation in computing (BPC) requires our individual and collective effort. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is leading an effort in the USA to encourage NSF grant awardees and all computing departments to create BPC plans. Panelists will share resources and advice for how attendees can get involved. Students, staff, and faculty can all play an important role in broadening participation in computing. Because the NSF effort and supporting resources on BPCnet.org are relatively new, the panel will introduce these efforts and share how attendees can help by sharing information within their institution and broader network. The NSF-funded project BPCnet.org has resources for developing and enacting BPC plans.

  PublisherDOI

• Engineering a Complete Curriculum Overhaul

  Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  We present an eight-year curriculum redesign effort impacting al-most every course in our computer science department. Having not made a major update to our curriculum in two decades, complications began to arise from significant increases in enrollment and instituting multiple degrees in computing in the same department. Starting from a desire to adjust a few courses, we systematically collected a broad set of requirements and blue-sky ideas from many stakeholders, resulting in an unsatisfiable set of content, ordering, and course boundary constraints. After multiple rounds of conversation with our stakeholders in and out of the department, we evolved and relaxed several of our constraints, allowing us to develop a compromise plan for seven new courses and a new prerequisite system. We then piloted five of the new courses and collected feedback on results, iterating on these courses each semester for two years. We worked with registrars, advisors, and administrators to develop a transition plan from old to new courses. This paper presents highlights of each step of this process, a summary of the resulting curriculum design, and reflections and recommendations for other departments that may want to undertake a similar update.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Departmental BPC Plans 2 - Finalizing your Plan

  2022-03-01

  articleSenior author

  A hands-on session for finalizing a Departmental BPC Plans for verification on BPCnet.org. Verification of a Departmental BPC Plan enables faculty from an institution to use it as part of a grant submission to the National Science Foundation (NSF). This workshop is intended for people from the United States who have an existing Departmental BPC Plan or who will have created one in the workshop "Departmental BPC Plans 1." The workshop is organized around a series of guided hands-on activities to help participants complete a draft of a Departmental BPC Plan that can be Verified by BPCnet.org.

  PublisherDOI

• Changes in K-8 Teacher Self-Efficacy with CS and Culturally Responsive Teaching through an RPP Workshop

  2021-03-03

  article

  This poster presents pilot results of a professional development (PD) workshop designed by a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) that focused on helping K-8 teachers integrate computer science (CS) concepts into other content areas using culturally responsive teaching (CRT) strategies. Preliminary results demonstrate that teachers significantly improved their self-efficacy to teach CS and self-confidence to use CRT in CS after the 4-week workshop. Results suggest that K-8 teachers can greatly benefit from PD experiences that focus on equitable CS instruction and pedagogy.

  PublisherDOI

• Non-photorealistic ray tracing with paint and toon shading

  2021-08-05

  articleSenior author

  We present a modification to traditional ray tracing that stylistically renders a scene with cartoon and painterly styles. Previous methods rely on post-processing, materials, or textures to achieve a non-photorealistic look. Our method uses a ray tracer to combine cel animation art styles with complex lighting effects, such as reflections, refractions, and global illumination. The ray tracer collects information about objects and their properties to dynamically switch between cartoon and painterly rendering styles. The renderer generates the styles by shooting additional rays for each pixel and collecting information such as normals, distance, slope, object identifiers, and light gradients from neighboring areas of the image. The resulting algorithm produces images with visual and artistic characteristics that allow artists to take advantage of rendering techniques that are not commonly supported in production ray tracers.

  PublisherDOI

• Lessons Learned from Providing Hundreds of Hours of Diversity Training

  2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology

  The past thirty years have seen many advances in our understanding of issues that impede diversity, as well as interventions that can remove or mitigate those impediments. The advances are generally presented in psychology journals and are under-consumed by computing educators, leading to the need for diversity training tailored to said educators. We have hundreds of hours of experience providing diversity training to computing educators, and have learned many lessons about how training should and should not be delivered to engage participants in understanding diversity-impeding forces and implementing interventions to improve the attraction and retention of diverse students. This paper is a collection of those lessons learned. We focus on concrete approaches to presenting material rather than on training organization or content, including a dozen specific practices that have proven particularly effective or ineffective in reaching diverse audiences. Examples include how how to avoid offending participants, how to help experts not lose their audience, how to pace and organize material for maximum impact, how we tie many topics into a single cognitive framework, and how we've learned to handle participant-raised objections. We also include commentary as to why we believe they did or did not work. We also describe possible future research to validate and expand on our observations and a few open questions for diversity training.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James P. Cohoon

  9 shared

• Colleen M. Lewis

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5 shared

• Allyson Kennedy

  U.S. National Science Foundation

  3 shared

• Mark Sherriff

  University of Virginia

  3 shared

• Yunjeong Chang

  3 shared

• Burçin Tamer

  Computing Research Association

  3 shared

• Leslie Cintron

  University of Virginia

  3 shared

• Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of Virginia

  2013

• M.S., Computer Science

  Brigham Young University

  2008

• B.S., Computer Science

  Brigham Young University

  2005

• A.A. and A.S. dual degree

  Lakeland Community College

  1999

Awards & honors

• Harold S. Morton Jr Award for Teaching (2017)
• UVA ACM student chapter's Professor of the Year award (2015,…