About ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award

Mark Allen Weiss was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for advancing the art and science of computer science (CS) education through his textbooks, research, and curriculum design, which have affected thousands of instructors and students worldwide.

Weiss’s most significant contributions to the evolution of the data structures and programming curriculum have been through his textbooks, which have been used in numerous countries and published in multiple editions over three decades (from the 1990s to the 2010s). He was one of the first authors to include advanced topics such as splay trees and amortized analysis with detailed implementations that matched the theoretical results outlined in the programming textbooks. His books were also groundbreaking in that they included in-depth presentations of C++ features and syntax, predating the Standard Template Library (STL) with vector and string classes.

Weiss has also led and contributed to important education projects. Beginning in the late 1990s, he was part of the Advanced Placement (AP) CS Development Committee that designed the AP curriculum and wrote the AP exams taken by US high school students. He chaired the committee for four years during the early 2000s, when the exam design was changing from C++ to Java, and the underlying curriculum was putting greater emphasis on object-oriented design and abstraction principles. He is also co-leading a project to help the US National Science Foundation set priorities for CS education research.

Notably, he has also been a champion for increasing diversity in the computing field, especially through partnership programs with other universities in the state of Florida. These programs include pooling courses to improve access to relevant subject matter, providing support for especially challenging courses early in the computing curriculum, and increasing financial support for high-ability students with economic needs. As Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at Florida International University, Weiss’s leadership in these programs has significantly increased the four and six-year graduation rates at his institution.

Among his many honors, Weiss has received the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education, the IEEE-CS Taylor Booth Education Award, and the IEEE Sayle Education Achievement Award.

Andrew McGettrick was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for his scholarship and tireless volunteer work and contributions, which have fundamentally improved rigorous computer science as a field of professional practice and as an academic pursuit.

Over five decades, McGettrick, a professor at the University of Strathclyde, has consistently made outstanding contributions to computing education. At the University of Strathclyde, he drove key curriculum improvements in Computer Science and Software Engineering. Additionally, his program evaluation initiatives for other universities and colleges improved the quality and rigor of undergraduate, Master’s, and doctoral programs around the world. McGettrick’s work for the UK government, including driving the first benchmarking standard for computing degrees and chairing the five-year revision of the QAA benchmarking standard for Master’s degrees in Computing, was similarly transformative.

McGettrick has played multiple leadership roles within the British Computing Society (BCS) and has served on the ACM Education Board for two decades. With Eric Roberts, he launched ACM’s Education Council, and he served as its Chair from 2007 to 2014. Under his leadership, the council developed numerous curricular volumes including the ACM/IEEE Curriculum Task Force’s Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Overview volumes. He recently served on the ACM Education Board’s Data Science Curriculum Task Force and helped launch the Learning at Scale series of annual conferences.

McGettrick was involved in the Committee on European Computing Education and was a co-founder and member of the Steering Committee of the Informatics for All coalition, a multi-organizational advocacy body that collaborates with the European Commission.

McGettrick’s publications include more than 130 research articles, textbooks, and scholarly papers. His white papers have shaped the nature and progress of computing in Europe. He also edited or co-edited numerous influential collections, including Concurrent Programming Software Specification Techniques (1988), Software Engineering – A European Perspective (1993), and Grand Challenges in Computing (2004). McGettrick was the founding editor of Addison-Wesley’s (now Pearson’s) International Computer Science series (~100 books) and co-editor of Taylor and Francis’ Computer Science undergraduate textbook series (20 books to date).

Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for his pioneering textbooks, software tools and research on learning concurrent programming, program visualization, logic, and programming languages, spanning four decades and aimed at both novices and advanced students in several subfields of computing.

Ben-Ari, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has authored 15 well-known and widely-used textbooks on topics including concurrent and distributed programming, programming languages, model checking, and mathematical logic. Many of these books are the definitive textbooks in their respective areas, and several have been translated into many languages.

In addition to his textbooks, Ben-Ari has developed several open source software tools for teaching computer science. The tools he developed and co-developed for teaching various subject areas include: for distributed and concurrent programming (DAJ, Jbaci); for model checking (JSpin and EriGone); for program visualization (the Jeliot animation tool); and for SAT solving (LearnSAT).

Ben-Ari has also been a leader in the area of computer science education theory, having written seminal research papers on constructivism and situated learning. Demonstrating his broad range of interests, he recently co-authored (with Francesco Mondada) Elements of Robotics, an open source textbook for high school students. Ben-Ari’s work has helped to educate and inspire generations of students in computer science.

Robert Sedgewick was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for developing classic textbooks and online materials for the study of algorithms, analytic combinatorics, and introductory computer science that have educated generations of students worldwide. Sedgewick is best known for his series of Algorithms textbooks, which have been bestsellers for four decades (12 books in four editions covering five programming languages). The books develop a scientific approach to the study of algorithms, based on experiments with real code to validate hypotheses about performance based on mathematical analysis.

His recent book (with Kevin Wayne), Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach, is a comprehensive introduction to the field and was named by ACM Computing Reviews as “Best of Computing Notable Book” for 2017. His book Analytic Combinatorics (with Philippe Flajolet) is an advanced graduate text that has been recognized with the 2019 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition.

More recently, Sedgewick has been extremely active as a pioneer and innovator in online education. He has co-developed extensive online content associated with his books that attract millions of visitors annually. Sedgewick has also recorded over 100 hours of online lectures on programming, computer science, and algorithms that reach hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The Sedgewick-Wayne Algorithms online course has been listed as one of the top 10 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) of all time.

The Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award is presented annually to an outstanding educator who is appointed to a recognized educational baccalaureate institution.  The recipient is recognized for advancing new teaching methodologies; effecting new curriculum development or expansion in Computer Science and Engineering; or making a significant contribution to the educational mission of ACM. Those with 10 years or less teaching experience are given special consideration. A prize of $10,000 is supplied by Pearson Education.

Judith Gal-Ezer was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for her central role in developing a groundbreaking high school computer science curriculum; her outstanding computer science education research; and her extensive service to the education community. In 1995 Gal-Ezer, who is currently a professor emerita at The Open University of Israel, led the development of a bold new CS curriculum for Israeli high school students. Her reimagined approach moved away from conventional pedagogies, which prioritized coding, to emphasizing the underlying ideas of computer science. Gal-Ezer’s framework was such a success at engaging students that many other countries used it as a model as they revised or introduced their own CS curricula.

Gal-Ezer’s seminal works include her 1998 paper “What (Else) Should CS Educators Know,” co-authored with David Harel. In the paper, she advocates that CS educators should extend their knowledge beyond regular CS coursework and be exposed to the foundational ideas of algorithms and systems. The paper inspired a whole generation of CS educators and contributed to a heightened appreciation of the inherent value of studying computing. Gal-Ezer has also been active in developing curricula at the university level. From 1985 onward, she played a prominent role in setting up computer science undergraduate programs, and later a Master’s program, at OUI, where she either personally wrote or supervised much of the CS coursework.

Outside Israel, Gal-Ezer has been an indispensable collaborator for several major organizations that advance CS education. She has been a member of key CS education journal editorial boards, served on the Computer Science Teachers Association’s (CSTA) Advisory Council, and more recently, joined the Committee on European Computing Education (CECE, a group consisting of members from the ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe) and Google’s education advisory council.

The Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award is presented annually to an outstanding educator who is appointed to a recognized educational baccalaureate institution.  The recipient is recognized for advancing new teaching methodologies; effecting new curriculum development or expansion in Computer Science and Engineering; or making a significant contribution to the educational mission of ACM. Those with 10 years or less teaching experience are given special consideration. A prize of $10,000 is supplied by Pearson Education.

Owen Astrachan was named recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for three decades of innovative computer science pedagogy and inspirational community leadership in broadening the appeal of high school and college introductory computer science courses. Astrachan, a Professor at Duke University, is known as “Mr. AP” because of the central role he has played in the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam taken by high school students. From 1985 to 1989, he served on the committee that writes the AP CS exam, and from 1989 to 1994 he was the Chief Reader, the person in charge of grading the exam. Over his three decades of involvement, Astrachan also played a critical role as the exam’s language changed from Pascal to C++, and later to Java, the language it is given in today.

His broad knowledge of the field, and the respect he garnered within the computer science education community, made him a natural candidate to be the Principal Investigator (project lead), in a 10-year National Science Foundation-funded effort to develop an AP CS Principles course and exam. An important goal of the AP CS Principles exam is to encourage participation in computer science by traditionally underrepresented student communities. The first AP CS Principles courses were offered in the fall of 2016 and the first exam was administered on May 5, 2017 to over 50,000 students— the largest first-year AP exam administration ever.

Astrachan has also made important contributions in several other areas of computer science pedagogy at the K-12/pre-college and college level. Many regard Tapestry, his introductory textbook for C++, as one of the best in the field. His extensive publications and talks on subjects ranging from object-oriented programming to software engineering instruction have also been highly influential. His role in advancing understanding computer science at every level has been strongly influenced by the community of students, teachers, and educators from whom he has learned and with whom he has shared so much.

The Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award is presented annually to an outstanding educator who is appointed to a recognized educational baccalaureate institution.  The recipient is recognized for advancing new teaching methodologies; effecting new curriculum development or expansion in Computer Science and Engineering; or making a significant contribution to the educational mission of ACM. Those with 10 years or less teaching experience are given special consideration. A prize of $10,000 is supplied by Pearson Education.

Armando Fox, a trailblazer in technology-enhanced education, received the 2015 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.

Fox was selected by his peers for contributions to computing education through leadership and curriculum development in international online education; creating innovative courses, tools and inexpensive textbooks for software engineering; and outstanding teaching. Fox is a leader in the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) field. At the University of California, Berkeley, Fox designed and launched a MOOC on software engineering that has bestowed 20,000 earned certificates and attracted 300,000 auditors from around the world.

In Fox's MOOC, students use free, modern, highly productive, open source programming frameworks to learn what had traditionally been taught only through lectures. To complement the MOOC, he and co-instructor Dave Patterson authored Engineering Software as a Service, a textbook which has garnered wide acclaim for being both accessible and affordable.

One traditional challenge for many MOOCs has been keeping students motivated to complete a course. Berkeley's software engineering MOOC incorporates an autograder system, which gives students instant feedback on their work. Fox believes that continuous interaction is one of the best ways to encourage online students to remain engaged. “Autograder-enabled MOOCs have an opportunity to provide more structured pedagogy based on ‘learning by doing,'” he says.

In the field of technology-enhanced education, Fox is also credited with developing the concept of and coining the term “Small Private Online Course” (SPOC), an offshoot of the MOOC movement. Beyond providing course materials, SPOCs seek to recreate the dynamics of a group of students working together with an instructor in an online environment. Adds Fox, “I believe the conversations that MOOCs have catalyzed will certainly result in permanent and profound structural changes, not only to higher education but in particular to continuing education.”

Fox is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley and an ACM Distinguished Member. He has also been designated a “Top Researcher” by Scientific American.

William Wulf is recognized for contributions as a teacher, author, and national leader who focused attention and changed the national education agenda and in the process supported the needs of underserved and under-represented students. As Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science & Engineering (CISE), he understood the role NSF played in supporting science and engineering in the US for both basic research and operation of several high performance computing centers and networks. As President of the US National Academy of Engineering, he advocated for advances in engineering education and technical literacy. Wulf is professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. An ACM Fellow, he received the 2011 ACM Distinguished Service Award.

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