Spotlight On: Chris Bentley

How do you find your way to Cambridge Center for Adult Education?
I first learned of CCAE in 1983 when I took a class in "Daytime Astronomy" there!

Can you share more about your interest and background in computer science?
I had seen computer generated images in an animation festival in the mid-1980s and wanted to understand how these images were created. Around the same time I started playing with the code from the "Computer Recreations" section of Scientific American, which introduced me to fractals, animations, chaotic systems, and simulations. I never lost my interest in small amounts of code that could generate fun effects! This spark of interest inspired me to pursue a certificate of Applied Science from Harvard Extension School, leading to an MS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and continued throughout my 32-year career in graphics programming at ATI/AMD.

What was it like working in the high tech industry in the 90s, namely producing technology as team leader of the AMD/ATI Mac graphics division? How has the field of graphics manufacturing changed in the past 30 years?
Working in high tech was thrilling and all-consuming. I was very proud of the products we worked on and especially of the work of my teammates, who were (increasingly) much smarter and better than I was. During the course of my career, graphics hardware became exponentially more pipelined, parallel, and powerful, and switched from fixed-function to programmable. This required JIT (Just In Time) shader compiler technology in the software layers. By the time I retired, the GPU (Graphics Processor Unit) was being used to perform rasterization, ray tracing and machine learning, and the driver software had to support all of these.

Following your history from former kindergarten teacher to junior high school teacher to adult education instructor, education is one throughline of your career path – what keeps bringing you back to teaching?
Whenever I learned anything I was always eager to share it with the next person coming up. I struggled with math as a kid (and still do) and so I'm excited to share with others the things I've found that make the climb up the mountain just a little easier.

Beyond functions and control structures, what else do you aim to share with your students at CCAE?
Apart from the material in the syllabus, there are some more ephemeral things: a love of programming; a playfulness in approaching puzzles; a feeling that math can be made interesting and narrative rather than scary and numerical; a forgiving attitude when it comes to bugs – we all make mistakes! During the past few courses, we've hit on this recurring theme that programming requires two levels of granularity: 1) the human speed, where you are slowly stepping through each instruction in your head and know what value each variable has, and then 2) the computer speed, where it's executing zillions of instructions in a flash and you view the code from a higher level of abstraction and don't try to follow each instruction.

What can students expect in your next offering, Introduction to Computer Science in Python, in Spring 2026?
Functions, loops and arrays... oh my! And recursion, strings, files, stats, sorting, Big O Notation, Object Oriented Programming (OOP), a little computer graphics and always some nice snacks to feed all the brain work.

How else do you create joy in your life outside of CCAE and in addition to teaching? What do you enjoy doing for fun?
Cooking, biking, hiking... Last summer I rode my bicycle across the Western half of the US. I'm still trying to figure out my next adventure!