Group 2: Transforming the educational experience: what might the community do to address the challenges?

Assumed/Perceived Challenges:

• National decline in CS enrollments, lack of interest in computing among middle school and high school students, computing is perceived as synonymous to programming, boring, unattractive, geeky, lacking excitement
• We are not attracting enough of the brightest and the most intelligent and curious students
• Lack of public understanding what really the “computing” discipline is. Does the discipline encompass everything that needs computing to solve its problems more efficiently and cost effectively or the discipline involves the core theory and practice that enhances computing capabilities and others are viewed as “applications of computing”? Inclusive vs. Exclusive definition?
• Women participation has seen precipitous drop while that’s not true in other science disciplines or in engineering disciplines or in Mathematics
• Decline of US role in global competitiveness

Societal needs/Future Trends:

• Numerous applications areas offering significant long term challenges requiring traditional computing knowledge and knowledge in application domains to develop the infrastructure (equipment, software, information) to addressing the challenges. As these intersections broaden, more training in the intersections is required in order to function more effectively therein; problems unique to these intersections will emerge, requiring the understanding and study of new underlying principles of computing in these domains.
• Current and future students who seek careers in computing will continue to need a core knowledge of the fundamentals of hardware and software system design, but such core knowledge is not enough;  deep knowledge of the domain of application of computing is now a co-requisite for effective problem-solving and discovery

Inhibitors:

• In high schools and for freshmen we teach programming in a language (syntax and all), not computer science let alone computing; we do not emphasize problem solving
• Current department structure in universities do not allow easy knowledge sharing and/or problem based learning
• We do not provide enough domain specific knowledge to our students to equip them to solve real life problems, do not provide enough relevance of computing to real life problems

What needs be done:

· Assess the graduates in terms of outcomes; they should have integrative experience in stead of doing things in a piecemeal manner, provide more application specific knowledge, team experience

· Provide more communication (verbal and written) skills, logical thinking skills, synthesis skills, reuse skills, deemphasize re-inventing wheels

· Reduce the core requirements to a minimal set, provide more flexibility to choose from a wide range of topics to complete degree requirements

· Use real life problem sets that are motivating, emphasize innovation

· Recognize that not all computing professionals need math or science to the same extent

· Encourage creativity, brainstorming, learning from mistakes, learning to learn by themselves, teach how to be adaptable

· Provide more design experience from different application domains

· Change granularity of courses to smaller modules, design prerequisite structure in terms of modules

· Provide training to think logically and precisely under pressure

Other Factors to consider:

• 4 yr colleges vs. 2 yr. colleges – transfer issues, lifelong learning capability of students
• Recognize that students come from diverse social and economic backgrounds – some will need a more prescriptive approach than others
• Faculty motivation to retrain and/or to adapt – research vs. teaching faculty, faculty workload issues
• More adjunct faculty from practitioners
• Effect of changes in K-12 education and preparedness of students
• Influx of international students or lack thereof