About The Author

John Owen is a highly successful Computer Science teacher, having taught for 33 years in Texas, over 20 in high school computer science, with students achieving high honors in state and national competitions, making top scores on the CS AP test, with many now working in the IT industry. He worked for eight years with the WeTeach_CS, an organization under the EPIC umbrella (Expanding Pathways in Computing), located in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) on the Pickle Research center campus of the University of Texas at Austin, helping to train and develop future computer science teachers, first in preparing to take the CS certification test, and then preparing for actual classroom instruction delivery.

Since the summer of 2015, John has conducted many face-to-face and virtual WeTeachCS workshops, taught online courses as an Oracle Academy instructor, preparing teachers for the certification test, as well as providing training in Alice, Greenfoot, and Java programming. He developed and authored the highly successful online course, Foundations of Computer Science for Teachers for both the TExES 241 and Praxis 5652 CS certification exams, with thousands of participants from all over the globe. The results of these courses is a 2000% increase in the number of teachers, in Texas alone, who have become certified since 2015, a total of over 500 over the past two years, compared to only 14 in the year 2014. Many other states have also seen significant increases in CS teacher certifications due in large part to their participation in the WeTeach_CS PD offerings.

During his teaching tenure, he served for six years as a Reader for the Computer Science Advanced Placement test, and mentored several high school sponsors as they worked to establish their own computer science programs. He recently served as the chairman of the Texas UIL State Computer Science Committee, leading the test and packet writing development team and helping to manage the implementation of District, Regional and State level competitions.

After retiring in 2013 from 33 years of public school teaching, his mission now is to help computer science educators all across Texas, the nation, and the world establish and improve computer science programs using these high-quality, tried-and-proven, free online lessons and low cost supplementary materials.