Professor

Dr. Youngblood is committed to science and engineering education at all levels and is a strong supporter of a mixed pedagogy (or andragogy if you prefer) involving elements of Socratic delivery, formal lecture, practical experience, and relevant examples with homework and projects that reinforce key concepts.

Dr. Youngblood served as a Computer Science Professor from 2006-2018 (on campus from 2006-2012) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte earning tenure during his time there. He does miss some parts of his academic life, especially working with good students, but feels that he is making a bigger impact working at PARC. He may be open to teaching a course in the future as an adjunct professor.

I learned to teach in an engine room and a floating repair facility. As lead nuclear instructor and training program manager aboard USS BOISE, USS CANOPUS, and USS EMORY S. LAND, I designed and taught coursework from radiation protection through nuclear physics to sailors ranging from brand-new enlistees to senior supervisors, in a setting where a wrong answer was never merely academic. That formation still defines how I teach: know exactly what a student can do today, be honest about what the work requires, and close the gap with structure, practice, and accountability. I held a professorship for twelve years and mentored industrial researchers for thirteen more, but I have been a teacher continuously since 1990.

Meeting students where they are

I take students as they come, because that is how education took me. My associate’s degree was earned by correspondence while standing watch at sea. My bachelor’s was finished as a veteran at a commuter university. My master’s was earned in the evenings while working full-time as a software engineer. I know precisely what studying while working costs, in sleep and in doubt, and I know that preparation is a history, not an ability. When a student arrives underprepared, overcommitted, or unsure they belong in engineering, I do not see a risk. I see a transcript that looks like mine. The teaching that follows is practical: find out what they actually know, name the gap without judgment, and build the ladder in reachable rungs. It worked for nineteen-year-olds learning radiation protection, it works for first-year computer science students meeting recursion, and it works  for engineering students facing their first design challenge.

Teaching through building

At UNC Charlotte I taught seventeen course sections across Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, AI for Computer Games, and the Game Design & Development sequence, from a first-year honors introduction to doctoral seminars. I created six courses, established two university-approved certificate programs, and served as founding Co-Director of the Game Design & Development programs. Games run through that record for a specific pedagogical reason: engagement is not a luxury, it is the mechanism. Students learn hard things when the work is worth showing someone. My computing-education research made the same argument formally, from Game2Learn to the BRIDGES system for data-structures assignments with real-world data, published at SIGCSE, to journal work on using game segments to teach advanced computer science.

The purest form of this philosophy is the studio. I mentored eleven senior design and studio teams of five to ten students, interdisciplinary groups of computer science and art students who scoped, built, tested, and shipped working systems: PC and Xbox games, an autonomous underwater vehicle, an unmanned aerial vehicle tracking system, a smart-home sensor network. Every studio ended in a public demonstration day. The public part is the pedagogy. A deadline you can slip is a suggestion; an audience that shows up is a commitment. Students who have integrated a real system under a real date, in front of real people, leave with something no exam certifies: the experience of having shipped. Having sat on the sponsor side of industry-defined projects in my industrial career, I also know what keeps an external partner engaged with a student team, and I teach students to manage that relationship as part of the work.

Advising as the long game

I have graduated three doctoral students, now at OpenAI, Sandia National Laboratories, and Salesforce, plus two master’s thesis students and dozens of project and undergraduate students. I have supervised 26 National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates students across three institutions, six industrial interns, and two postdocs. The advising I am proudest of is the least conventional: my final doctoral student was a self-funded working professional who completed a nationally competitive dissertation while employed full-time. We built her program around her life, not the department’s default clock. That is the model I value, and it is also where my teaching has always extended beyond the university: introducing engineering to 8th through 10th graders in summer outreach, judging high school robotics, advising student organizations from programming clubs to an autonomous vehicles lab, and sixteen years as a Scouting leader and merit badge counselor in Engineering, Atomic Energy, and Computers.

Standards, and the paperwork that protects them

The Navy taught me that documentation is not bureaucracy; it is the operation, and no one signs what they cannot defend. I bring that same posture to academic standards. I have done SACS accreditation preparation with rubric development and application for graduate programs, served three years on an Institutional Review Board, and run assessment as part of teaching rather than an interruption to it. High standards without structure is gatekeeping. Structure without standards is theater. The job is to hold both: tell students exactly what competence looks like, give them the scaffolding to reach it, and certify nothing that is not true.

Teaching engineers for the collaboration era

The most important thing I will teach in the next decade is judgment. My research studies how engineering changes as AI shifts from tool to collaborator, and the classroom is where that transition lands hardest: generation is becoming cheap, and responsibility is not. Students now need what young engineers have always needed, but sooner and more explicitly: the ability to specify what they want, verify what they are given, and sign their name to the result knowing the difference. I watch working engineers navigate this daily in an industrial AI lab, and I want to bring what they are learning back to students while their habits are still forming.

From new enlistees in an engine room to doctoral candidates at a defense, the job has never changed: meet them where they are, show them what the work requires, and stay until they can sign their own name to it.

Game Design & Development Program

• ITCS 4230/5230 Introduction to Game Design & Development*

• ITCS 4231/5231 Advanced Game Design & Development*

• ITCS 4232/5232 Game Design & Development Studio*

• ITCS 4236/5236 Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Computer Games (Interactive AI)*

Computer Science

• ITSC 8110 Introduction to Computing and Information Systems Research

• ITCS 6156 Machine Learning

• ITCS 3153 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

* I co-designed along with Tiffany Barnes the Undergraduate and Graduate Certificate Programs and all classes in the Game Design & Development at UNC Charlotte during my tenure there. Many graduates of that program have gone on to successful careers in both games and movies.

Typically only disgruntled students comment on public websites, but since it is public I might as well embrace some of it. Here is what some former students had to say... My RateMyProfessor Page. I think it is what you can expect from an MTV website. Remember when MTV was about music? I miss those days. Video may have killed the radio star, but apparently reality TV killed the video star. Anyway, there is some truth in the complaining—I am a tough professor, but many of my students have let me know that I more than most helped prepare them for their careers from a technical and professional view.