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Chris Mayfield
Professor

Dept of Computer Science
James Madison University
701 Carrier Drive, MSC 4103
Harrisonburg, VA 22807

Office: King Hall, Room 208
Email: mayfiecs@jmu.edu
Phone: +1 (540) 568-3314

About Me

Welcome to my website! I have been at JMU since Fall 2011. I enjoy teaching programming, advising first-year CS majors, and designing K-12 outreach. I am actively involved with the POGIL community and was a co-PI of the IntroCS-POGIL project. I am a coauthor of Think Java, a textbook published by O’Reilly Media and used at many universities and high schools around the world. I received a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University and bachelor's degrees in CS and German from the University of Utah.

On a personal note, I like to run, bike, hike, sing, program, write, and travel. I am a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and currently serve as a bishop in Harrisonburg. I've also self-published a Thinline Edition of the Book of Mormon with modern formatting inspired by the NIV Bible. My wife Stacie is an electrical engineer and web developer. We are busy with five children ages college to preschool. I'm not a fan of social media, but I love to chat on Discord with my family, friends, and students.

Teaching

Previous Semesters:

Research

My research focuses on CS education and faculty development at the undergraduate and high school levels. I am currently a co-PI for two NSF-funded projects: one that studies student engagement in CS1 (DUE 2216454) and one that supports high school CTE teachers (CNS 2219770).

I've also written many POGIL activities for CS0, CS1 Java, and CS1 Python. The CS0 and CS1 Java collections are available in my cspogil repository. The Python collection has been endorsed by The POGIL Project and is available upon request (just email me). Several of my activities are featured in the EngageCSEdu repository.

Service