Robert Luciano is the computer science teacher at Pocono Mountain East high school, a lower socio-economic school in northeast PA. He has been a public school teacher for 29 years. Twenty years ago Robert took over the computer science courses at Pocono Mountain East. Prior to Robert taking over the computer science classes no student had ever passed the AP Computer Science exam at his school. The last 4 years more than 20 students annually have passed the AP Computer Science exam at his school. Robert has worked hard at making his computer science classes more inclusive of non-typical computer science students. The percentage of female students in his classes has risen from 5% to 30%. Underrepresented minority student participation has risen from less than 5% to more than 25%. His incorporation of logic groups and interesting cooperative activities has enabled atypical students to succeed in computer programming. He has presented at 18 Tapestry Computer Science workshops across the U.S. over the past 9 years. His presentations are always rated highly by workshop participants. Robert was recently honored for his outstanding teaching. He was one of 10 teachers worldwide to receive the 2017 Award for Excellence in Teaching Computer Science. The award was sponsored by Infosys, ACM, and CSTA.
Michael Genesereth is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He is best known for his work on computational logic and its applications in enterprise computing, computational law, and general game playing. He has taught logic for 30 years at Stanford.