User:Tom.naps

Tom Naps

For over 20 years Tom Naps was the primary Computer Science instructor at a small liberal arts college (Lawrence University in Appleton WI) where the Computer Science concentration was integrated into a Mathematics major. Currently he is completing his 14th year in a seven-member Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Tom is an active contributor to two large open-source projects in algorithm visualization. The first of these, JHAVE, delivers instructional visualizations on algorithms that span the entire curriculum. It relies on a client-server architecture, with both the client and server written in Java. Since 2011 he has been actively involved in the OpenDSA (Open Data Structures and Algorithms) project hosted at Virginia Tech. The client software for OpenDSA is developed in JavaScript, and that is where Tom has focused his efforts. The server back-end is currently written in Python using the Django framework.

At UWOshkosh, Tom has taught most of the courses in the curriculum. In particular he often teaches a project-oriented Software Engineering II course, and it is in that course that he hopes to incorporate HFOSS.