Anna Batra is a computer science educator whose teaching centers on helping students develop confidence, critical thinking skills, and a sense of belonging in computing. She believes that all students can succeed when provided with a supportive learning environment that encourages curiosity, collaboration, and persistence.
Having followed an interdisciplinary path into computer science through linguistics, Anna understands that there is no single "right" way to become a computing professional. She enjoys working with students from diverse academic backgrounds and helping them discover their strengths as they find their place within the field.
Before joining Cascadia College, Anna served as an instructor of record for Data Structures and Algorithms at the University of Washington, Seattle and worked as both an undergraduate and graduate Teaching Assistant in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. These experiences sparked her interest in computing education and the ways evidence-based teaching practices can improve student engagement and learning.
At Cascadia, Anna teaches programming courses as well as upper-division courses in the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science program, including data structures and algorithms, discrete mathematics, and computability theory. She is particularly interested in helping students develop computational thinking skills, understand the mathematical foundations of computing, and build confidence in tackling complex problems. She enjoys working with students at all stages of their educational journey, from those exploring computer science for the first time to those pursuing advanced study in computer science.
Education
- M.S. in Computational Linguistics, University of Washington, Seattle
- B.A. in Linguistics, University of Washington, Seattle
Research Contributions
Computer Science Education
- Lin, K. (2024). Teaching Accessible Design in Data Structures and Algorithms. ICER 2024.
- Batra, A., et al. (2024). “It Can Relate to Real Lives”: Attitudes and Expectations in Justice-Centered Data Structures & Algorithms for Non-Majors. SIGCSE 2024.
Computational Linguistics & Machine Learning
- Davenport, J., et al. (2024). WU_TLAXE at WASSA 2024 Explainability for Cross-Lingual Emotion in Tweets Shared Task 1: Emotion through Translation using TwHIN-BERT and GPT. WASSA 2024.
- Batra, A., et al. (2024). Document Classification Techniques for Aviation Letters of Agreement. AIAA AVIATION Forum and ASCEND 2024.
- Ahn, E. P., et al. (2023). An Outlier Analysis of Vowel Formants from a Corpus Phonetics Pipeline. Interspeech 2023.
- Ghosh, S., et al. (2023). “Do We Like This, or Do We Like Like This?” Reflections on a Human-Centered Machine Learning Approach to Sentiment Analysis. HCII 2023.
Hobbies
Outside the classroom, Anna enjoys traveling, exploring new cultures, binge-watching Korean and Chinese dramas, and attending K-pop concerts. When she's not teaching or thinking about computer science, she's likely planning her next trip or catching up on the latest episodes of a drama.