Rate My Professor Tim Bell

Tim Bell is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Canterbury, where he has been an academic staff member since 21 April 1988. He obtained his PhD from the University of Canterbury in 1986, with a thesis titled "A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression." Bell's research interests include computer science education, compression, and computers and music. He developed the Computer Science Unplugged programme, which consists of offline activities and games that teach fundamental computer science concepts to school children without the use of computers. The programme's teacher's manual has been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and approximately ten other languages. Google Inc. provided funding for its further development in 2006.

Bell's innovative teaching methods, including the production of podcasts to expand on lecture content, have been highly praised. He received the University of Canterbury Teaching Medal in 2007 for his enthusiasm, technical knowledge, and ability to captivate students. Major awards also encompass the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education in 2018, election as an ACM Distinguished Member in 2018, and appointment as Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to computer science education. Key publications include "Computer Science Unplugged . . . off-line activities and games for all ages" (1998, with Ian H. Witten and Mike Fellows), "Text Compression" (1990, with John G. Cleary and Ian H. Witten), "Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images" (1999, with Ian H. Witten and Alistair Moffat), "Computer science unplugged: school students doing real computing without computers" (2009, with Jason Alexander, Isaac Freeman, and Mick Grimley), and "A case study of the introduction of computer science in NZ schools" (2014, with Peter Andreae and Anthony Robins, ACM Transactions on Computing Education). Bell is registered to supervise Master's and Doctoral students.