EUR ING Dr Tony Cowling

National Teaching Fellow 2012 Dr Tony Cowling discovered computing as an undergraduate at Leeds, and after studying there for his PhD he moved to Sheffield in 1973. At first he was a lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, but transferred to the Department of Computer Science when it was established in 1980. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1999. As a committed teacher, an important focus of his research work has been on trying to find ways of helping students to master the inherent complexities of computing. Initially this concerned developing systems to support the teaching of programming, but when Professor Doug Lewin arrived as head of the department in 1986 and convinced Tony that he was really a software engineer, the focus shifted to the problems of trying to teach this new discipline. Tony led the creation of the departments undergraduate degree in software engineering (one of the first in the world), and has been active ever since in developing models that help to structure the curriculum for software engineering, and indeed for computing in general. This work has led to participation in various international activities concerned with computing curricula: accreditation workshops in the USA and Lithuania; European Union 'Tempus' projects in Hungary and Romania; the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society project to develop a model curriculum for software engineering (published in 2004); and currently the similar project to revise the model for Computer Science (for publication in 2013). Another strand to this work has been various contributions to the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training and its associated Academy, currently including membership of the steering committee for the conference. Tony's preferred method of teaching is to link projects, on which students work, with lectures to explain what they need to know to carry out the projects. At the same time, he is keen to show students how research problems arise from the practical issues of how software systems should be engineered, drawing particularly on his own technical research interests in formal modelling of systems and in the empirical study of software engineering activities.