iOS and Android instructor Owen Mathews comes to Big Nerd Ranch following a decade of work in education: two years in the Peace Corps in West Africa teaching math, and then eight years working as an educational technologist and computer science teacher at The Lovett School in Atlanta, GA. Prior to that he worked for three years as a software engineer.
Owen started programming in BASIC on an Atari 2600 and an Apple IIe and has been hooked ever since. He considers programming to be the perfect blend of structure, creativity and elegance—as much an artistic pursuit as painting or sculpture. At Lovett he sought to provoke the same inspiration in his 6th through 12th grade students by creating projects in Logo, Scratch and Java. He made his first foray into independent development with an iPhone app in 2009, and was pleased to find iOS a fun and rich environment for expressing his ideas.
Owen is a lifelong singer, and has sung for 10 years with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus—a gig that has taken him to Carnegie Hall and won him a Grammy (shared by 300 co-musicians). More recently he has been exploring some jazz open-mic opportunities around Atlanta. Soccer is his drug of choice; he gets his fix as many times a week as possible. He is an avid cook, especially if he can host a dinner party. His dog is a beagle mix named Ollie, and he is working on teaching him programming so that Ollie can join him at work every day.
