University Awards
Recognising Excellence

Outstanding Educator Award

My teaching philosophy is guided by a commitment to nurturing students into independent, self-directed learners and equipping them with the evaluative judgment needed to thrive in the age of generative Artificial Intelligence. While I began my teaching journey with a strong focus on making lectures interactive and engaging, my approach has since evolved to emphasise long-term educational outcomes and deeper learning. ” Associate Professor Damith Chatura Rajapakse
Department of Computer Science
School of Computing
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Current Teaching Portfolio

  • Software engineering
  • Object-oriented programming

Teaching Achievements

  • An educator with a passion for software engineering education, Associate Professor Damith seeks to nurture independent learners equipped with evaluative judgement skills. He has developed various educational technology tools to this effect, including TEAMMATES, a flexible software which offers peer feedback capabilities beyond that of typical learning management systems. Over the past 11 years, TEAMMATES has attracted 1.2 million users from over 1,500 educational institutions worldwide, with about 600 NUS students involved in contributing code to the software.
  • Associate Professor Damith also scaled up software engineering education by accommodating larger class sizes and extending the duration of learning beyond the typical semester. Strategies for the former include monitoring learning progress via dashboards and boosting student participation via Zoom. For the latter, courses were strategically strung together to form an informal learning pathway, affording students more opportunities to engage in extended software engineering training.
  • His open-ended approach allows students to control the depth and pace of their learning. In lower-level courses, a blended learning approach combines online and in-person learning. No premature feedback is given on graded work, enabling students to first exercise their own evaluative judgement, rather than rely on their tutor's input. For higher-level courses, a problem-based learning approach promotes self-learning through real-world projects and open-ended tasks.

Publication Credits

  • Authored and co-authored numerous chapters and books on software engineering education, including:
    • Using Similarity Patterns in Developing Web Applications
    • A First Course in Object-Oriented Software Engineering (2nd edition)
    • Overcoming Challenges in Software Engineering Education
    • Handbook of Research on Mobile Software Engineering

International Standing

  • Judge panel member for numerous local competitions, such as the Elsevier Code Jam and Singapore Science and Engineering Fair
  • Judge panel member of Open-Source Software World Challenge, South Korea (2011–16)
  • Presented as invited speaker at international conferences, including:
    • 4th International IT conference (2015)
    • 1er Congreso Internacional de TI de las Universidades Tecnológicas (2011)
    • International Conference on Network, Intelligent and Computing Technology (2011)

Awards and Accolades

  • Fellow, NUS Teaching Academy (AY2012/13 – AY2022/23)
  • Cluster lead, NUS Teaching Academy (AY2022/23)
  • NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Honour Roll (AY2013/14 – AY2016/17)
  • NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award (AY2010/11 – AY2012/13)

Education

  • PhD (National University of Singapore)
  • BSc (University of Moratuwa)
 
 Honour Roll Recipients