Wayne Honored as Distinguished Educator by ACM
Kevin Wayne, the Phillip Y. Goldman Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, has been selected as a Distinguished Educator by the Association for Computing Machinery, the international scientific/professional society for computer science.
The honor recognizes association members who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field. The ACM, which has more than 100,000 members worldwide, selects only about five members yearly as distinguished educators.
Professor Robert Sedgewick, who has developed a number of courses and co-authored textbooks with Wayne, noted his colleague’s dedication to creating coursework that students view as both compelling and relevant to their lives. “He is unusually effective because he embraces technology and because he is able to see things from a student’s point of view,” said Sedgewick, the William O. Baker Professor in Computer Science. “Not long after he arrived here at Princeton [in 1998], Kevin told me: ‘You know, most students are absorbing only about half of the material you’re throwing at them. If you pick the 75% that you consider the most important, you could reach a lot more students, and they’ll learn a lot more.’ He also began building the Internet content that we now know as booksites. Our enrollments are up by about a factor of five since that time, and our booksites attract millions of hits per year.”
Wayne is the coauthor (with Sedgewick) of two leading textbooks — “Algorithms, 4th Edition” and “Introduction to Programming in Java, An Interdisciplinary Approach” — that are used as standard texts at colleges and universities around the world, including Princeton, where their courses General Computer Science (COS 126) and Algorithms and Data Structures (COS 226) are among the most popular at the University. The courses take the view that the study of computer science and algorithms is essential for most college students and have been adapted as models for the ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricula 2013. Wayne regularly teaches COS 226 and often teaches COS 126 and COS 423 (Theory of Algorithms).
“Kevin’s insight is that by replacing the more technical 25% of the standard course with interesting applications from science, engineering, and commercial computing, these courses can have broad appeal,” Sedgewick said. “The purpose of a university is to ‘produce and disseminate knowledge.’ Few individuals are poised to achieve that ideal by reaching as many people in the future as does Kevin.”
Wayne has been at the forefront of the move to put education online. Beyond the booksites, he and Sedgewick have developed MOOCs on the Coursera platform that have attracted nearly 1 million enrolls.
In 2011, Wayne won the Distinguished Teaching Award from Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In nominating Wayne for that award, Andrew W. Appel, professor and Computer Science Department chair, noted that Wayne’s courses were unusually popular with students and that “creative, relevant, challenging, and interesting programming assignments are a big part of what keeps the students coming back.”
Wayne earned his Ph.D. in operations research and industrial engineering from Cornell University in 1999.
