Courses | Hasan Baig

CSE 1010 (with AI Integration)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: University of Connecticut
Offered in: Fall 2025, Spring 2026

About:

To ensure that students used GenAI effectively rather than dependently, I transformed the course into a project-based learning (PBL) format and developed a custom, course-specific GPT agent named PyPal (Python Pal). Students were required to seek AI assistance exclusively through PyPal, which was deliberately designed to provide scaffolded guidance, reflective prompts, and conceptual support, rather than complete code solutions. This design discouraged direct solution retrieval from public GenAI tools and promoted authentic engagement with course material.

Project-based learning was selected to provide students with a purposeful and coherent learning experience, enabling them to immediately apply newly acquired concepts to a real-world problem. Each week, students completed a focused mini-project during class within a 15-minute time window, using guided assistance from GenAI tools. Importantly, these mini-project tasks were intentionally designed so they could not be easily translated into simple prompts for general-purpose GenAI platforms, thereby encouraging problem decomposition, critical thinking, and conceptual reasoning.

Details of PyPal can be seen here. The updated lecture slides and recorded video lectures can be accessed from the links given above.

CSE 2050

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: University of Connecticut
Offered in: Fall 2022, Spring 2023

About:

This course provides an introduction to fundamental data structures and algorithms. The emphasis is on understanding how to efficiently implement different data structures, communicate clearly about design decisions, and understand the relationships among implementations, design decisions, and the four pillars of object-oriented programming: abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.

Lecture slides can be downloaded from the link given above.

CSE 3666

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: University of Connecticut
Offered in: Spring 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026

About:

In this course, students learn basic principles of digital systems and computer architecture. They also learn about RISC architecture, instruction set architecture, assembly language and how to write programs in it. In addition, they learn computer arithmetic, the design/organization of a single-cycle data path and a pipelined RISC processor followed by the memory hierarchy.

Lecture slides can be downloaded from the link given above.

This course is very popular and have been accessed across the globe. Following image shows the youtube analytics during the past 365 days.

Youtube analytics of the playlist between April 5, 2025 - April 6, 2026.

CSE 1010 (old)

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: University of Connecticut
Offered in: Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Summer 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Summer 2025.

About:

In CSE 1010, students learn how to solve computing problems using algorithmic thinking, programming, computing logic, processes, and environments. Lab assignments were developed from problems in mathematics, science, and engineering. The contents of this course are prepared using zyBooks. In this course, Python is used as the main programming language.

Lecture slides can be downloaded from the link given at the top left.

Digital Logic Design

Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: Habib University
Offered in: Fall 2019

About:

Digital Electronics is at the very heart of the modern world. From smart phones to ‘Big Data’ to the electronics that controls our everyday lives, digital electronics plays a central role. An understanding of the basics of digital logic design is an essential skill for every engineer irrespective of their field of interest.

I was a lead-instructor of this course and was asked to redesign this course as much as competitive, challenging, demanding and the best course to make it renowned as “the flagship course” of Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Habib University. I, being the lead instructor, redesigned this course from scratch in Fall 2019. There were three other instructors involved in this course but, being a leader, I enforced them to keep the lecture contents the same in all five sections. To achieve this, I took the initiative to design the slides and distribute among all other instructors. We made the course project very challenging, but the lectures and lab manuals were designed to support students in the best possible way.

I also organized the DLD Project Exhibition and Competition (DPEC) for the very first time to appreciate students' efforts in achieving the challenging goals of the course project. Highlights of the course and DPEC 2019 can be seen in the following video.

This DPEC has become part of my legacy and now has been organized annually ever since. The glimpses of the entire course and the DPEC are shown in the following short 2.45m video.

Lecture slides can be downloaded from the link given above.

Computer Architecture

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: Habib University
Offered in: Fall 2018, Spring 2019

About:

This course is centered around the RISC-V processor architecture. The students learn basic principles of computer architecture; how Moore’s law has traditionally helped in performance increase and the effect of impending end. They also learn the assembly language of RISC-V processor architecture and how to write programs in it. They also learn the design of a pipelined RISC-V processor. Caches, their working and their effect on program performance are also discussed.

I developed this course from scratch and taught it twice in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 at Habib University.

Embedded Systems

Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: Habib University
Offered in: Spring 2019

About:

This course equip students to demonstrate their abilities to design and develop an embedded system-on-chip. The goal is to introduce students a hardware description language (HDL) which they can use to develop embedded hardware on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips. Furthermore, they will be introduced with the architecture of an ARM Cortex processor and how a software and hardware communicate at embedded level. This understanding can help the graduates of EE/CS to become a part of a team of design engineers and developers of embedded applications in any organization. This course teaches the embedded hardware-software co-design centered around the Xilinx ZYNQ SoC device with ARM processor architecture.

The contents of this course were developed from scratch during the Spring 2019 semester at Habib University.

Data Structures and Algorithms

Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: Habib University
Offered in: Spring 2018

About:

The objective of this course is to give students a programming intensive experience of commonly used data structures and algorithms to solve problems of moderate complexity. The data structures covered during the course include Stacks, Queues, Dictionaries, Trees, and Graphs. Various algorithms or algorithmic techniques are also introduced that include Searching, Sorting, Tree/Graph traversals, and Divide-and-conquer. The course also expose students to the basics of algorithmic complexity analysis and introduces O-notation and Master Theorem to assess and compare the performance of different algorithms.

Computer Organization and Assembly Programming

Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Role: Instructor.
Institute: Umm Al Qura University
Offered in: Spring 2013

About:

I taught this course to a group of students with limited proficiency in English, and I was informed that male students, in particular, often felt less motivated to engage with the subject. This presented a significant challenge, but I was able to spark their interest using a variety of pedagogical techniques and an inductive teaching approach grounded in real-world examples. I believe students are more motivated to learn theoretical concepts when they perceive a practical need for them—hence, I emphasized the application of theoretical knowledge in real-life contexts.

To address concerns about student performance, I implemented a motivational strategy by initially assigning full marks to all students, framing it as their responsibility to maintain those grades throughout the semester. Additionally, I developed a custom software application (screenshot shown below) that allowed students to track their progress online. This visibility encouraged consistent effort, as students were motivated not to let their grade trajectories decline. The course received very positive feedback from the students.

Figure A1. An pedagogical technique to keep students active and work hard in class.