Barbara Boucher Owens

Last updated
Barbara Boucher Owens
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater New York University
The University of Texas at Austin
Ohio Wesleyan University
Known for computer science education
Awards SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Education Community (2016)
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Institutions Southwestern University
St. Edwards University
Mercy College
Website people.southwestern.edu/~owensb/

Barbara Boucher Owens is an American computer scientist noted for her leadership in computer science education. She was the Chair of SIGCSE from 2007 to 2010 and an elected member of the SIGCSE Board for 16 years from 1997 to 2013. [1]

Contents

Education

Boucher Owens received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1965. She received a Master of Arts degree in Experimental Psychology from The University of Texas at Austin in 1967 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Applications to Education from New York University in 1977.

Career and research

Boucher Owens started her career at IBM in 1967 in the area of computer assisted instruction. She began her teaching career in 1970 at Brooklyn College as an Instructor in Psychology and founded their Department of Computer Science in 1971, teaching there until 1977. She was an Instructor of Computer Science at City University of New York (CUNY) in 1979. She has been a faculty member at Mercy College in Computer Science from 1982 to 1988. She became an associate professor at St. Edward's University in Computer Science in 1989 and was promoted to Professor of Computer Science in 1996. In 1999 she became an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Southwestern University, and retired as an Emeritus Professor in 2012.

Boucher Owens is one of the co-founders of the Computing Educators Oral History Project. [2]

Awards and honors

Boucher Owens notable awards include the following awards.

Related Research Articles

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.

SIGCSE is the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computer Science Education (CSE), which provides a forum for educators to discuss issues related to the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of computing programs, curricula, and courses, as well as syllabi, laboratories, and other elements of teaching and pedagogy. SIGCSE is also the colloquial name for the SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, which is the largest of the four conferences organized by SIGCSE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Gries</span> American computer scientist

David Gries is an American computer scientist at Cornell University, United States mainly known for his books The Science of Programming (1981) and A Logical Approach to Discrete Math.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Kölling</span> German computer scientist

Michael Kölling is a German computer scientist, currently working at King's College London, best known for the development of the BlueJ and Greenfoot educational development environments and as author of introductory programming textbooks. In 2013 he received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education for the development of the BlueJ.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Guzdial</span>

Mark Joseph Guzdial is a Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He was formerly a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the College of Computing and the GVU Center. He has conducted research in the fields of computer science education and the learning sciences and internationally in the field of Information Technology. From 2001–2003, he was selected to be an ACM Distinguished Lecturer, and in 2007 he was appointed Vice-Chair of the ACM Education Board Council. He was the original developer of the CoWeb, one of the earliest wiki engines, which was implemented in Squeak and has been in use at institutions of higher education since 1998. He is the inventor of the Media Computation approach to learning introductory computing, which uses contextualized computing education to attract and retain students.

Owen Astrachan is an American computer scientist and professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University, where he is also the department's director of undergraduate studies. He is known for his work in curriculum development and methods of teaching computer science. He was one of the first National Science Foundation CISE Distinguished Education Fellows, and is a recipient of the ACM Outstanding Educator Award. He was the principal investigator on the multi-year NSF/College Board project that led to the release of the AP Computer Science Principles course and exam.

Joyce Currie Little was an American computer scientist, engineer, and educator. She was a professor and chairperson in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan H. Rodger</span> American computer scientist

Susan H. Rodger is an American computer scientist known for work in computer science education including developing the software JFLAP for over twenty years. JFLAP is educational software for visualizing and interacting with formal languages and automata. Rodger is also known for peer-led team learning in computer science and integrating computing into middle schools and high schools with Alice. She is also currently serving on the board of CRA-W and was chair of ACM SIGCSE from 2013 to 2016.

The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium is the main ACM conference for computer science educators. It has been held annually in February or March in the United States since 1970, with the exception of 2020 when it was cancelled due to COVID-19. In 2019, there were 1,809 attendees and 994 total submissions from over 50 countries, with a total of 2,668 unique authors representing over 800 institutions and organizations. There were 526 paper submissions, with 169 papers accepted across the three paper tracks which was up 5% over 2018. It is a CORE A Conference.

Nell B. Dale is an American computer scientist noted for her work in computer science education and computer science introductory programming textbooks. She was on the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Board from 1981–85, and from 1987–93, and was Chair of SIGCSE from 1991–93. She was Chair of the SIGCSE Symposium in 1991 and Co-Chair of the SIGCSE Symposium in 2000.

Eric S. Roberts is an American computer scientist noted for his contributions to computer science education through textbook authorship and his leadership in computing curriculum development. He is a co-chair of the ACM Education Council, former co-chair of the ACM Education Board, and a former member of the SIGCSE Board. He led the Java task force in 1994. He was a Professor emeritus at Stanford University. He currently teaches at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

Susan Beth Horwitz was an American computer scientist noted for her research on programming languages and software engineering, and in particular on program slicing and dataflow-analysis. She had several best paper and an impact paper award mentioned below under awards.

Gloria Townsend is an American computer scientist and professor in the department of Computer Science at DePauw University in Indiana. She is known for her work in evolutionary computation and her involvement with women in computing. She has served on the executive committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Council on Women in Computing. She is the author of One Hundred One Ideas for Small Regional Celebrations of Women in Computing. In 2013, she received the Mr. and Mrs. Fred C. Tucker Jr. Distinguished Career Award for notable contributions to DePauw through her commitments to students, teaching excellence, their chosen disciplines, and service to the university.

Cynthia Bailey Lee is a lecturer in Computer Science at Stanford University from Palo Alto, California. Her research interests are in computer science pedagogy and the flipped classroom approach. She has advocated for the greater inclusion of women and minorities in computer science, and is known for her "ladysplaining" article addressing the author of the controversial Google memo.

Amber Settle is an American computer scientist and professor of education and theory in the department of Computer Science at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for her work in computer science education and her continuing service and leadership in Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). She is also known for her work on computational thinking.

Judith Gal-Ezer is an Israeli computer scientist and computer science educator known for her development of the high school computer science curriculum in Israel. She is a professor emerita at the Open University of Israel.

Daniel Zingaro is an associate professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga. His main areas of research are in evaluating Computer science education and online learning. He has co-authored over 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences; and also authored a textbook, "Invariants: a Generative Approach to Programming.

The SIGCSE Lifetime Service to Computer Science Education is an awarded granted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) SIGCSE annually since 1997, for lifetime contributions to computer science education.

Susan Sentance is a British computer scientist, educator and director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates a wide range of issues computer science education, teacher education and the professional development of those teaching computing. In 2020 Sentance was awarded a Suffrage Science award for her work on computing education.

Sally A. Fincher is a British Computer Scientist and Emerita Professor of Computing Education at the University of Kent. She was awarded the Suffrage Science award in 2018 the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education in 2010 and a National Teaching Fellowship in 2005.

References

  1. "Southwestern | Department of Mathematics & Computer Science".
  2. Barbara Boucher Owens. "Computing Educators Oral History Project". www.southwestern.edu. Retrieved 2016-02-20.
  3. SIGCSE. "SIGCSE 2016 Award Winners". SIGCSE. Retrieved 2016-02-20.
  4. Association for Computing Machinery. "ACM Awards - ACM Distinguished Member". ACM. Retrieved 2016-02-20.