The Department is pleased to welcome Michael Hewner, a visiting lecturer for the 2011-12 academic year.

Hewner is taking a year off from his doctoral work at Georgia Tech to help the department while Professor Jeff Forbes is on leave for an assignment at the National Science Foundation. Hewner is co-teaching the department’s courses on software design (CS 108) and data structures (CS 100) as well as instructing the programming competition seminar (CS 149s) this fall. In the spring, he’ll drop the 100 course and teach operating systems (CS 110) in addition to the others.

"Michael is passionate about computer science pedagogy, and his presence with us presents great opportunities for growth and learning in both directions," Computer Science Chairman Carlo Tomasi said.

Hewner received his master of computer science, specializing in software engineering, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked in industry for two years, mostly for Amazon.com, before heading to Georgia Tech to research computer science education. He is studying the way students view computer science when they enter the field and how that view changes after four years as an undergraduate.

“It’s sort of an interesting position students have to be in,” Hewner said. “They have to make decisions about what they’re going to study, but they have to make the decisions without knowing 100 percent what they’re getting into.”