DRAFT -- March 6, 2000
This report is a working draft and does not carry
any endorsement from the sponsoring organizations
In the fall of 1998, the Computer Society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE-CS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) established a joint task force to undertake a major review of curriculum guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. The charter of the task force was expressed as follows:
To review the Joint ACM and IEEE/CS Computing Curricula 1991 and develop a revised and enhanced version for the year 2001 that will match the latest developments of computing technologies in the past decade and endure through the next decade.This report -- Computing Curricula 2001 or CC2001for short -- builds on several earlier reports including Curriculum '68 [3], A Curriculum in Computer Science and Engineering [19], Curriculum '78 [4], The 1983 Model Program in Computer Science and Engineering [17], and Computing Curricula 1991 [39]. The relationship of this report to its predecessors -- along with the lessons that the CC2001 Task Force derived from them -- is discussed in Chapter 2.
Under our charter, the central goal of the CC2001 effort is to revise Computing Curricula 1991 so that it incorporates the developments of the past decade. Computing has expanded and changed dramatically over that time. One of our first tasks, therefore, was to identify the nature and scope of those changes. The evolution of computing and the effect of that evolution on computing curricula are described in Chapter 3.
From a curricular perspective, one of the most profound changes over the past decade has been a substantial broadening of the discipline. In its early years, computing was often identified with computer science, which draws its foundations primarily from mathematics and electrical engineering. The curriculum reports cited earlier in this chapter reflect this history and focus on curriculum development in those branches of computing that follow most directly from this tradition: computer science and computer engineering. Today, computing has grown to such an extent that these two areas no longer cover what has become a much more diverse discipline. Computing is now a critical part of many academic fields, from business management to molecular biology. In this report, we have tried to understand the structure of that larger discipline and the ways in which the traditional body of knowledge associated with computing fits into that larger world. The question of the increasing breadth of the discipline and its impact on curriculum design is discussed in Chapter 4.
Our consideration of the effectiveness of past reports, the changes over the past decade, and the overall broadening of the discipline have led us to articulate a set of principles that have guided the task force in preparing this report. Those principles are enumerated in Chapter 5 and applied to the specific concern of curriculum design in Chapter 6.
The remaining chapters of the report consist of strategic discussions of various aspects of the computing curriculum organized around general pedagogical themes rather than by specific subdiscipline. These themes, which correspond to the set of six Pedagogy Focus Groups established by the CC2001 Task Force, are as follows:
|
DRAFT -- March 6, 2000 This report is a working draft and does not carry any endorsement from the sponsoring organizations |
|