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NSF and VT to support computing education |
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 Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, associate professor of CS, and Steve Harrison, CS research faculty, both at Virginia Tech, as well as Lillian Boots Cassel, professor of CS at Villanova University have recently earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) - Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) - Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) – Community Building (CB) award of $80,000 for their work focused in advancing computing education in an interdisciplinary fashion.
Computing education is essential not only for computer science (CS) and its many sibling disciplines, such as computer and software engineering, information systems, and so on, but for practically all other academic disciplines. Computers are pervasive today and many professionals develop basic programming skills as a way to express ideas, problems and solutions in computational terms within their own disciplines. It is common to find curricula in the arts, for example in music and graphical design; in business, usually in accounting and economics; and in sciences such as biology, chemistry, physics, as well as in social sciences with computational courses in their curriculum. In a way, computing is becoming a requirement of most professional degrees.
"Computers are pervasive today and many professionals develop basic programming skills as a way to express ideas, problems and solutions in computational terms within their own disciplines. Therefore, computing education is essential not only for computer science and its many sibling disciplines, but for practically all other academic disciplines," said Pérez-Quiñones.
Specifically, the vision of this work is to reach a clarified, comprehensive understanding of different computing disciplines that allows shared experiences and expertise within and across the disciplines. This collective sharing enables computing to collaborate with other disciplines that use computing to enhance groups, and to create new cross-disciplinary areas of study and research.
To that end, three workshops will be hosted to bring together a sample community of educators who use the arts, different media, and design at introductory and capstone levels of undergraduate computer science education, and educators who use computing concepts at introductory and capstone levels of undergraduate art, design, performance, and media education. The goal is to learn and report of pedagogy from these alternative courses and approaches and to create new partnerships among and between members of this diverse community of educators.
“We will host several workshops to identify innovative approaches to teaching computing, identify priorities, opportunities, difficulties, and resources needed to rethink computing education. Participants will include faculty from all of the computing disciplines, industry representatives, students, and faculty from disciplines we do not usually think of as computing intensive,” said Pérez-Quiñones.
The first NSF- sponsored workshop, entitled “Connecting Computing Educators Across Traditional Boundaries,” was held Friday, November 2nd at the Inn at Virginia Tech (photo). The focus was on media computation, computing in the arts, and other similar topics.
A second workshop will be held at Villanova and will bring together computing instructors from many different disciplines - computer science, computer engineering, information systems - from the several universities around the Philadelphia area.
The third workshop will seek to bring forward the points of view and experiences of minority groups, specifically Hispanics, African Americans and Native Americans, to help create more inclusive computing education programs.
“By including faculty from underrepresented groups and from different disciplines, we extend the reach of computing education and its reformulation beyond the traditional group of people that participate in committees and symposiums on the topic,” Pérez-Quiñones said.
According to the NSF, CB awards support community-building efforts that bring stakeholders together to discuss the challenges and opportunities inherent in transforming undergraduate computing education, and to identify creative strategies to do so. The scope of CB activities is deliberately broad; CISE encourages the community to develop creative strategies likely to effect transformation in undergraduate computing education at the institutional, local, regional and/or national levels and across all institution types.
For more information, please see http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06608/nsf06608.htm
Photo: Lillian "Boots" Cassel (Villanova University), Steve Harrison (VT), Caleb Jones (VT), Manuel A. Perez- Quinones (VT). Second row left to right: Doug Blank (Bryn Mawr College), Carlos Evia (VT). |
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