Chris Bourke

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Chris Bourke

Professor of Practice School of Computing University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Contact

Address
SHOR 105
Lincoln, NE 68588-0150
Phone
402-472-5008 On-campus 2-5008
Email
chris.bourke@unl.edu
Website
Website
Social Media

My research interests include Computer Science Education, Computational Complexity Theory and Machine Learning, though my primary activities are teaching. I have over 25 years of computing education experience. I teach a wide variety of computing courses with a focus on introductory-level and honors courses (including CS1, CS2, and CS3). Each year I teach an interdisciplinary Virtual Reality course in collaboration with the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. In support of my education mission, I have authored several Open Educational Resources including several textbooks and I host a successful YouTube channel. Recently I have published educational research papers in top CS education venues. I am also the Director of the School of Computing Honors Program.

Education

  • PhD, Computer Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2008
  • MS, Computer Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2004
  • BS, Computer Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2002

Teaching

Recent Publications

  • Chris Bourke. "Developing a Differential Attendance Policy for Introductory Computing Courses". In: ASEE 2026, to appear. 2026. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke et al. "Developing and Validating a PDC Exam for Introductory Computing Students and Researchers". In: IPDPS/EduPar 2026, to appear. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke. "Codeless Modules for Parallel and Distributed Computing in Early Computing Curriculum". In: Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.1. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2026, pp. 141–147. ISBN: 9798400722561. URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3770762.3772500 [PDF]
  • Yael Erez, Chris Bourke, and Orit Hazzan. "Executable Exams in the Era of Generative AI: Revisiting Taxonomy, Implementation, and Prospects" In: Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.2. SIGCSE TS 2026. USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2026, pp. 1321–1322. ISBN: 9798400722554. DOI: 10.1145/3770761.3777272. url: https://doi.org/10.1145/3770761.3777272. (poster) [PDF, PDF]
  • Chris Bourke and Nirnimesh Ghose. "Improving Student Success Through Parachuting". In: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges 40.6 (Apr. 2025), pp. 29–38. ISSN: 1937–4771. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke and Justin Firestone. "Codeless PDC Modules for Early Computing Curriculum". In: 2024 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW). 2024, pp. 357–364. DOI: 10.1109/IPDPSW63119.2024.00082. [PDF]
  • Aditya Jain, Ryan Bockmon, Chris Bourke, Stephen Cooper.  "Validating a Language-Independent CS1 Learning Outcomes Assessment".  In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Global Computing Education Vol 1. CompEd 2023. Hyderabad, India: Association for Computing Machinery, 2023, pp. 78–83. ISBN: 9798400700484. DOI: 10.1145/3576882.3617910. url: https://doi.org/10.1145/3576882.3617910. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke, Yael Erez, and Orit Hazzan. Executable exams: Taxonomy, implementation and prospects. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1, SIGCSE 2023, page 381–387, New York, NY, USA, 2023. Association for Computing Machinery. [PDF]
  • Ryan Bockmon and Chris Bourke. "Validation of the Placement Skill Inventory: A CS0/CS1 Placement Exam". In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1, SIGCSE 2023.  Toronto ON, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery, 2023, pp. 39–45. ISBN: 9781450394314. DOI: 10.1145/3545945.3569738. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569738. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke. Development & Evolution of a Computer Science I Course. Technical report, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, December 2021. Available, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/prtunl/202/.

Older Publications

  • Derrick Stolee, Chris Bourke and N. V. Vinodchandran, "A Log-Space Algorithm for Reachability in Planar Acyclic Digraphs with Few Sources," 2010 IEEE 25th Annual Conference on Computational Complexity, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2010, pp. 131-138, doi: 10.1109/CCC.2010.36. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke, Raghunath Tewari, and N. V. Vinodchandran. Directed planar reachability is in unambiguous log-space. ACM Transactions on Computation Theory, 2008. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke, Kun Deng, Stephen D. Scott, Robert E. Schapire, and N. V. Vinodchandran. On reoptimizing multi-class classifiers. Machine Learning, 71(2-3):219-242, June 2008. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke. A note on the Karp-Lipton collapse for the exponential hierarchy. Technical Report UNL-CSE-2007-0004, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke, Raghunath Tewari, and N. V. Vinodchandran. Directed planar reachability is in unambiguous log-space. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, pages 217-221, 2007. [PDF]
  • Deng Kun, Chris Bourke, Stephen Scott, and N. V. Vinodchandran. New algorithms for optimizing multi-class classifiers via ROC surfaces. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop ROC Analysis in Machine Learning (ROCML-2006), pages 17-24, June 2006. Held within the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'06). [PDF]
  • Chris Bourke, John M. Hitchcock, and N. V. Vinodchandran. Entropy rates and finite-state dimension. Theoretical Computer Science, 349(3):392-406, 2005. [PDF]

Misc