Suranga and Dr. Spears program the Maxelbot, a robotic platform designed and built for our Distributed Robotics Laboratory by Dr. Jerry Hamann, Tom Kunkel, and Paul Maxim.

Tau Beta Pi Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award: Prof. William M. Spears

July 5, 2006 - Prof. William M. Spears is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wyoming. He received his BA in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and his MS and PhD from George Mason University. His research includes such diverse topics as swarm robotics, evolutionary algorithms, viral epidemiology, operations research, machine learning, and the mathematical modeling of complex distributed systems. He teaches Analysis of Algorithms, Evolutionary Algorithms, Distributed Robotics, and the Mathematical Analysis of Distributed Agents.

Before coming to the University of Wyoming, Prof. Spears worked as a research scientist for the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC for over 15 years. Hence, it came as quite a shock to him when he realized that he enjoys teaching as much as research! Prof. Spears views teaching as a mentoring process where the goal is to help each student to expand his intellectual horizons. He feels that the greatest success occurs when the teacher/student line disappears and the class learns together.

Prof. Spears has had a substantial impact on students because of his creative, non-traditional teaching methods. These methods include group problem solving, whereby a whole class becomes involved in solving challenging problems, and an emphasis on the use of first principles. The latter is crucial to the future success of students in highly adaptive real world situations. Also, his methods generate increased student enthusiasm, yielding a noticeable increase in the number of University of Wyoming undergraduates who apply to graduate school.