Glimpses into the Future of Computer Science Education
Gitta Domik
(University of Paderborn, Germany
domik@upb.de)
Abstract: This paper discusses necessary changes to the computer
science curriculum at universities for the future. The alterations are
grouped into the following five areas: content and body of knowledge; pedagogy;
audience; training-on-the-job; and professional skills. The paper argues
that extending the scope of knowledge beyond the narrow borders of primary
computer science topics ("breadth in computer science") will
lay a solid foundation for building the necessary skills for the future
work force.
Keywords: education, curriculum, breadth in computer science,
women in computer science
Category: K.3
1 Introduction
During the time this paper is being written (February to May 2001),
enormous changes in the headlines concerning the IT market have occurred.
The future for computer science graduates can be seen as ambiguous: Financial
Times, February 2001, records 500.000 IT jobs open in the US, 1.2 Mio IT
jobs open in Europe, with an estimated 5 Mio open IT jobs globally by 2005.
The share of the IT market in the GNP in Europe is estimated to double
from 5% by 2010. In April 2001, IT news turned unpleasant: The Washington
Post reports a decrease of 44% in the demand of IT workers in the last
year, with a continuing slow-down in IT hiring. USA Today reports that
tech spending fell 6.4 percent during the first quarter of 2001 for the
first time in 10 years.
One of the most extensive reports to evaluate the software and IT-service
market was recently finished for Germany [Stahl et al.,
2000]. By December of 2000, 28.000 jobs were claimed to be open at
that time in Germany, with 55.000 software development jobs expected to
be open within a range of 12 months ("bare minimum of needs").
The job market in these fields was predicted to grow by 120% until 2005.
Many enthusiastic headlines about the IT job market during the past
two years have increased the number of students entering their first year
of a computer science program at a university. Requests by industry have
been met to provide for more IT workers with a solid background within
a shorter time frame. Germany saw the start of many "Bachelor Degree"
programs for computer science students at universities. This decreased
their typical nine semester curriculum to (in most cases) six semesters,
with an option to continue the regular program of nine semesters, then
finishing as "Diplom-Informatiker/in". The consequences of the
new, now pessimistic headlines
will still have to be seen. It is the opinion of the author, supported
by this years computer science graduates in the US (May 2001), that potential
changes in the hiring policy will affect graduates from education systems
at levels other than universities. US computer science graduates found
a pleasant job market in spite of the above quoted headlines.
The content of this paper, however, is not driven by the declining or
inclining Nasdaq stock market, though economy is always influencing implementation
of necessary transformations at universities. After all, universities need
funding for any changes and additions and funding is driven by the need
as seen by society at large and in particular by government and industry.
This paper is about changes pertaining to the curricula of computer science
at universities as a preparation to the variety of jobs open to our computer
science graduates. The amount of students to teach plays a lesser role
in this paper.
2 What Changes Will we Observe
Changes that are necessary to the education in computer science are
best grouped into the following five categories: content and body of knowledge;
pedagogy; audience; training-on-the-job; and professional skills.
2.1 Change in Content Within an Ever Increasing Body of Knowledge
Curriculum '68, Curriculum '78, and Computing Curricula 1991 have documented
some of the past efforts to continuously adapt computer science education
to the ever expanding body of knowledge that encompasses computer science.
Recently the draft of Computing Curricula 2001 (called "Ironman Draft")
has become available on the web [Curricula 2001]
as a documentation of the ongoing effort of the "The Joint Task Force
on Computing Curricula" including education leaders chosen by the
IEEE Computer Society and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to
make recommendation for computer science education in the new millennium.
With reference to the content, the report points out the need for more
education in areas where the importance has significantly grown over the
past ten years, such as networking, security, object oriented programming,
or embedded systems. Shifts in the focus of teaching include the evaluation
of existing software solutions versus new software developments, or the
increase in the use of multimedia and graphics. Computer science has also
become broader - many application areas have grown together with the field
of computer science and the curriculum needs to lay a foundation for an
understanding of the issues involved. [Curricula 2001]
discusses in detail recommendations for various computer science areas
and their extent in a computer science curriculum. Table I summarizes their
suggestions for area and size of fourteen main themes.
- Discrete Structures (43 core hours)
- 2. Programming Fundamentals (54 core hours)
- Algorithms and Complexity (31 core hours)
- Programming Languages (6 core hours)
- Architecture and Organization (36 core hours)
- Operating Systems (18 core hours)
- Net-Centric Computing (15 core hours)
- Human-Computer Interaction (6 core hours)
- Graphics and Visual Computing (5 core hours)
- Intelligent Systems (10 core hours)
- Information Management (10 core hours)
- Software Engineering (30 core hours)
- Social and Professional Issues (16 core hours)
- Computational Science (no core hours)
Table I: Fourteen computer science areas and their extent
as recommended by [Curricula 2001]
More important than individual changes to the courses is the recommended
teaching structure. The constant increase in the body of knowledge of computer
science demands a number of core units that are relevant to any computer
science undergraduate and therefore required in the curriculum. Additional
knowledge is then added on in elective units, where units are individual
divisions of predefined computer science areas. This will allow to set
a "standard" for computer science graduates while at the same
time making room for new or applied topics to come into the curriculum.
The main - and complex - effort here is for universities and industry
to agree on standards and on accreditations [Curricula
2001], [Clark, 00].
2.2 Change in Pedagogy Through Technology
New technology is changing our teaching and learning styles. Ready access
to information and lectures on the Web, sharing curricula across the Internet,
joint lecturing across distant locations, distance learning and other teaching
and learning modes reach new kinds of students, create new responsibilities
for professors and change the teaching and learning environments everlastingly.
In April of 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that
it will make the materials for nearly all its courses freely available
on the Internet over the next ten years. The new program, called MIT OpenCourseWare,
is the largest in a series of similar efforts across the world. While these
efforts seem to offer "knowledge for everyone", the much discussed
Digital Divide is progressing (because of it) at similar speed.
Many of the pedagogical changes have already occurred at the Universities
without much effort: seminars are taking advantage of on-line information,
lecture notes are being modified and published immediately during the lecture,
homework may be submitted from home and discussed with the professor or
with peers in an interactive distant mode. While distant learning is currently
still reaching the "odd"
and not the regular student, universities will need to carry out long-term
changes to find their global role in education [Tsichritzis,
99]. If they do not worry about these issues now, their funding might
become unstable.
The Digital Divide, meaning the separation of people and organizations
having access to the Internet from those who do not, has vast economical
influence. Programs to prevent economical disaster to development countries
and to certain social structures within well-to-do economies might be hurt
by the current down-turn of IT economy. An effort must be made within the
education community to build bridges across that rift.
2.3 Change in Audience
Since it seems like a good economical decision to prepare for a job
in the areas of information technologies, we see a strong increase in our
number of students studying computer science but also a stronger diversity
in the types of students we host in our computer science programs. Some
students bring extended knowledge about areas of computing with them when
they enter their first year of study, some bring solely their interest
to learn about it. Teaching styles at the University must accommodate all
kinds of students, taking maximum advantage of their background and release
them with a comparable set of skills. Diversity in skills is particularly
noticeable at lectures at entry level. Some universities have started to
set up different levels of lab exercises in the beginning year, working
towards a more homogeneous group in the second year.
While the level of skills at entry level is diverse, so are the interests
of our "new" students. Presently we attract students of a broader
variety of interests, having in common only the need for the necessary
understanding of underlying computer science fundamentals and technology
that they want to use in a diversity of jobs. Many of these students are
not only interested in the "core curriculum" of computer science,
but in principles of economy, art, sciences or any other area, in which
they will seek a job later on, though wanting to rely on a solid knowledge
of the technology and its fundamentals on which to base their work and
interests.
Last but not least computer science lecturers see an increase of students
not majoring in computer science. Demand for service to other departments
has increased to a point where, together with the increase of their own
computer science students, it is often not manageable for the computer
science department.
An approach that encompasses students at different levels of interest
and entry knowledge is called breadth first. This approach gives
a holistic view of the field of computer science in a first (series of)
introductory lecture(s). The "breadth first" method therefore
prepares computer science students for the coming depth of each area covered
while leaving students, who are only going to look into specific topics,
without total blanks in their knowledge of the whole field. Even students
who will not take any more courses in computer science will have received
an appreciation of what computer science encompasses. While many educators
believe in such an approach, it has not been a popular form of a first
year course of computer science, but we will most likely see this approach
more often in the future.
These last years have seen the start of many new interdisciplinary courses
and projects at the lower, mid and upper level of a curriculum. These are
usually in a smaller setting than beginner's lectures, often project or
seminar oriented and have shown good results in developing both academic
and professional skills. The breadth approach therefore needs not
end after the first semester, but can be followed throughout a whole curriculum.
2.4 Less Training-for-the-Job
The last turn of the century has seen an immense demand for IT workers.
In a time where students are recruited while still at high-school and computer
science graduates can almost pick their salaries, people with appropriate
skills are put to work as soon as they show up for the job. There is little
time to do extensive training-for-the-job [Edwards, 00].
Moreover, many of these IT experts work at start-ups where no one is available
to show them the ropes. While the tech market takes a decline at the first
and second quarter of 2001, companies are interested in short-term employment,
meaning again that training is often eliminated. At the same time work
as "free agents" and/or teleworking leaves many of the work force
out of the otherwise offered training at the company base.
What students can not gather on the job they need to learn at the university.
The demand is therefore high to match students and industry needs early
on. This may be done during practice semesters, summer internships, but
also by involving practitioners from industry with university courses.
Such cooperation must become part of the curriculum to guarantee
a smooth transition from graduation to the workforce [El-Rewini
and Mulder, 97]. It is also important to encourage and train a life-long
learning concept while students are still working on their first degree.
The most important ingredient in a life-long learning concept is the solid
basis to build new understanding on, which the university must provide
early on.
2.5 More Need for Professional Skills
Two major changes in the job world of computer scientists drive new
needs at the education level. The first change is from programmer level
to management level, where we find many of our graduates just a few years
after their graduation. The other change is from being the acknowledged
expert ("god") in a technological field to being the service
(wo)man on a piece of equipment everyone needs and uses. Management
and communication skills, acceptable English in written and oral form,
customer orientation, social competence (including ethics) are the
skills that were not foremost demanded of computer science graduates in
the 80´s or even 90´s, but are in high demand now and in the
future [Lethbridge, 00], [Mahn
et al., 99].
Most universities are moving towards including several spots in their
curriculum to develop and train these skills, starting during the first
year. While training is sometimes done in specially targeted courses, these
values and abilities are mostly being trained during courses, seminars
and projects with a focus on specific computer science topics. Courses
in software engineering lend themselves well to develop skills
for working in teams during first semesters and develop skills for project
leadership in later semesters. Communication skills are enforced in oral
presentations and written reports. While this is not a new concept, giving
feedback to the student and evaluating these values and abilities as part
of a grade is recent enforcement. In many non-English speaking countries
a section of the curriculum, if not all, is being held in English, to prepare
for work in the Global Market (and to include foreign students to enhance
the internationality of the University). Training the service angle can
again be done as part of course work (e.g. usability, human computer interfaces,
e-commerce), or as part of a project with local industry, or as part of
an interdisciplinary project, where computer science students are building
to the demands of other students.
3 Computer Science Expands
3.1 The Demand for "Breadth" in Computer Science
The burden computer science departments currently carry is that
- the demand (and need) for more service to other departments increases
at a much faster pace then funding for the department
- both the scope of knowledge to teach our students and their interests
are growing and spilling over into neighbouring disciplines
- there is more need to prepare students for self-training ("life-long
learning") and development of professional skills
All of these demands can be met by keeping a broad view on the computer
science areas throughout the computer science curriculum. To begin with,
a "breadth first" approach will improve the capacity of computer
science education by teaching a first course to all students, computer
science students and others alike. Similar, with known prerequisites, students
of other disciplines can join with the regular computer science students
a number of computer science courses during their curricula. For computer
science students, keeping the broad approach will improve their knowledge
of applied information technology, and make them understand the various
areas of computer science while they will only be able to learn in-depth
about a core curriculum and their specially elected courses. For students
of other disciplines, taking computer science courses will saturate their
understanding of their discipline with relevant computer science knowledge
and at the same time give them more marketable job skills. One of the main
principles of Computing Curricula 2001 is "Computing is a broad
field that extends well beyond the boundaries of computer science."
and can be best served by such a broad, interdisciplinary approach.
In the interdisciplinary working of computer science and other students
lies the secret to learning many professional skills for the computer science
students. Their team members of other disciplines can act as "custumers",
bringing applied topics to joint projects. Such projects mix application
and technical depth with each student bringing valuable knowledge to the
project. Team building and communication skills are different and rather
reality-like in such mixed environments, with the advantage that there
is still guidance provided.
There are more and more universities fusing their computer science curricula
with interdisciplinary courses and even generating interdisciplinary curricula
around computer science. In most cases, these changes come about through
the interest and far-sightedness of individuals fighting an uphill battle
with university regulations. While many believe that the demands for a
better work force can be met this way, universities themselves are hard
to change, especially in a short time frame. What we can see is the change
in the social and professional network between educators of various disciplines
and industry leaders, who can move faster into the new direction than the
university as a whole can [King, 01]. Degree programs
in interdisciplinary areas surrounding information technology have arisen,
because of the described obstacles usually in form of initiatives
and certificates rather than approved degrees, and in all
cases (known to the author) have drawn high numbers of students. In the
following sections I will summarize some instances to such interdisciplinary
courses supporting the notion of a broad computer science curriculum:
3.2 ATLAS at the University of Colorado at Boulder
The Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society (ATLAS) is a campus-wide
academic initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) that
started in 1997 and integrates information and communication technology
into its various curricula. ATLAS reaches out to the K-12 system, penetrates
the teaching and learning mode by offering innovative and effective uses
of technology in the class room, and spurns and supports new (usually interdisciplinary)
courses and research activities. ATLAS is fundamentally interdisciplinary.
Its target is to prepare students for a well-informed use of information
technology [ATLAS].
Fostered by ATLAS, the certificate-granting multidisciplinary curriculum
in Technology, Arts and Media (TAM) has been available to undergraduate
students of any discipline (non-technical or technical, humanistic, scientific,
or otherwise) since January 2000. By April 2001 it had over 150 full-time
students enrolled. Enrollments had tripled in the preceding six months.
Students come from almost every discipline, with Communication and Journalism
majors having the highest representation. It is interesting to note that
TAM courses attract a high amount of women (above 60%), though many of
its courses are technical in nature.
TAM naturally has a strong home in the computer science department.
Several courses are offered jointly for the TAM program and for computer
scientists, two of these are described in more detail below. TAM courses
taught by the computer science faculty strive to mix the technical in-depth
knowledge of computer science students with background knowledge from students
of other disciplines to design and develop new technologies for the future.
While intended to broaden the knowledge of computer scientists and training
professional skills not offered in other courses, TAM has also been a solution
to students switching from computer science to a less technical field (e.g.
Fine Arts) while still taking advantage of their technological skills by
mastering the TAM certificate on their way to a "Bachelor Degree".
TAM is targeted for a larger role in the computer science curriculum by
encouraging more participation by computer science students to broaden
their knowledge particularly in the media/design directions.
3.3 Technology for the Community
One of the courses offered within the TAM program, and also open to
computer science students in their regular undergraduate degree program,
is a course "Technology for the Community", developed by Professor
Liz Jessup (computer science department). For the first course in Spring
of 2001, a truly heterogeneous mix of students signed up, where computer
science students were in the minority and women were in the majority. The
course was advertised to "develop computational products designed
to serve the needs of local community service organizations." In a
two-day workshop and together with experts of various fields (e.g. teachers,
community leaders, community volunteers) the students formed and discussed
several ideas of needs of their community that technology could solve.
In the first part of the course students learned methods and tools to develop
technology (e.g. data bases, web technology, user interface design) the
second part saw the development of two projects to meet needs of the community.
One project transformed a paper-based evaluation sheet for a local school
into a computer based, and thus reusable, evaluation report. The second
project developed an on-line brokerage for offering donations from individuals
to appropriate organizations. The students had opportunity to meet with
their "customers" throughout the project. During one of the last
weeks of the semester students presented their projects at a national conference.
Throughout the second part of the course, several lecture times were taken
up by guest speakers, linking technology and community needs from their
daily work experience. It was a pleasure to personally experience the success
of the resulting projects and the intellectual and professional development
of the students during this semester.
3.4 Courses as Seeds
The course "Designing the Information Society of the New Millennium"
by Professor Gerhard Fischer (computer science department) falls into the
same category as the course described above: offered as a TAM course as
well as within the regular curriculum for computer science students. The
goal is "to explore how new media will impact learning, designing
and collaboration in the information society of the next millennium."
The class, open to both graduate and undergraduate students, was announced
as an interdisciplinary course in an attempt to attract participants from
a wide range of backgrounds, interests, and experiences. The majority of
the 30 students who enrolled during the Spring semester 2000 were undergraduate
(67%), male (70%), and from computer science (86%). A new teaching model,
the courses as seeds model, designed to understand and learn to
resolve open-ended and multidisciplinary problems, was implemented for
this course [see dePaula, Fischer, and Ostwald, 01].
The summary here is taken from this reference.
The kernel of the courses as seeds model is the seeding, evolutionary
growth, and reseeding model (SER model), where seeding describes
the creation of the initial state of a system that is intended to evolve,
evolutionary growth describes the phase of unplanned evolution as
the seed is used by the members of a community to do work, and reseeding
is a deliberate effort to
organize, formalize, and generalize knowledge created during the evolutionary
growth phase.
The courses as seeds model lends itself well to interdisciplinary
courses in a technological setting. It fosters self-directed learning,
active collaboration, and consideration of multiple perspectives. It is
a valid form of teaching, when problems do not have right answers,
and the knowledge to understand and resolve them is changing rapidly, thus
requiring an ongoing and evolutionary approach to learning. Educators are
guides in this process who also do not have all of the relevant knowledge
but are learners as well. While the courses as seeds model offers
an excellent method to follow for "breadth" courses in computer
science, it also contains a number of possible pitfalls, which are well
described in the named reference.
Examples of final projects over the last two years include "Defeating
the digital divide - creating user designers", "LifeStyles -
A game about the global ecological impact of your lifestyle", or "Wireless
Access Retrieval Protocol for Enabled Devices".
3.5 Augmented Reality as a Bridge Between Technology and Application
At the University of Paderborn the course "Pictures in a Computer"
was developed and implemented by the author in 2000/2001. The one semester
course was offered only to students with no or little technical background.
Its primary goal was to teach methods of digital image processing to these
students, allowing them to develop the fundamental understanding necessary
to train themselves in the use of any commercial image processing software
of the future. Its secondary goal was to knock down barriers to using technology
in an everyday setting. The third goal was to support (and observe) a corporation
between computer science students and non-technical students.
The first goal, instilling a fundamental knowledge of the methods of
digital image processing, was accomplished in a classical class room setting
extended by on-line teaching technology. Additionally, once a week students
met in a PC lab and performed supervised lab exercises using an interactive
programming language suitable for image processing. Two computer science
students (graduate level) were hired as student assistants to supervise
the lab and help with all assignments. At the end of the semester, students
took a final (written) exam over questions of contrast enhancements, filtering
techniques, compression techniques, and colour models.
During the first weeks of the semester, examples of virtual and augmented
reality (VR and AR) worlds were introduced. Students had the opportunity
to wear VR equipment and get the feeling for VR and AR applications. Soon
after this introduction, a brainstorming session on "How can technology
help to overcome problems in our everyday lives?" was held in the
classroom with only the students, two professors (of media sciences and
computer science) and the two computer science students present. By mid-semester,
the students had to propose possible topics for a final project. They were
told that they could rely on technical help from the two computer science
students and had time to meet independently of the instructor with the
computer science students. From six proposed topics, the lecturer chose
"The virtual jungle map", an orientation walk through the University
of Paderborn for first year students.
None of the students had worked with AR or VR equipment before this
class. Students developed quickly the necessary self-confidence in using
the equipment and various software packages to formulate their input into
the system, still under the guidance of the two computer science students.
The finished project offered help in form of orientation maps throughout
the university campus and information on key personnel (e.g. staff and
faculty of specific departments) through the AR equipment at appropriate
times.
The course consisted of a small amount of students from the media department,
including eight female and three male students. Two project teams were
formed between these students and the two (graduate, male) computer sciences
students. Collaboration between all of these students worked out extremely
well, leading to an excellent evaluation of the course by participation
students. Therefore, the second and third goal of the course were met as
well.
4 Women will Shape the Information Society
4.1 Current Situation
In Germany, the number of women opting for a degree in computer science
has been below 10% for most of the ´90s and climbed just recently
to 13-15%. At the same time, the number of women finishing a computer science
bachelor's degrees in the US is quoted by Financial Times in February of
2001 as below 28%. The two universities used as samples throughout this
paper, the University of Paderborn, Germany, and the University of Colorado
at Boulder, US, show currently 15% and 14 %, respectively, of women entering
the computer science program. These numbers stand for many Western European
countries and the US with the possibility of a minor deviation. These numbers
are lower than the 25% or the 34 %, respectively, Germany or the US have
seen in the participation of women in computer science during the ´80s.
Possibilities for the decline may be the overemphasis of programming in
the introduction of computer science in high school, the misconception
over computer science (or for that matter IT) jobs, lack of role models
and other reasons. The slight increase during the last years has been brought
on by dedicated programs to motivate girls in high school to consider computer
science as their choice of university degree. Girls seem to have as much
interest in computers as boys during their teenage years, but rather in
the computer as a tool to use and not as an item of interest by itself.
As a consequence, applied computer science programs in Germany as they
have been available over the last years, such as "Computervisualistik",
"Medieninformatik", or "Bioinformatik" have typically
30% of women or more in their first year. In several countries in Europe,
including Scandinavian countries, Spain and Italy, participation of women
in computer science and engineering has been more encouraging. This section
will particularly address Germany and the US and countries with similarly
low numbers in the participation of women in the field of computer science.
4.2 Is There Need to Increase the Amount of Women in Computer Science
In those countries with a significantly low participation of women in
computer science programs, governments and industries have recently spent
much money to increase that percentage. The outcry for more IT workers
and the fear of an economic slow-down if not enough IT workers can be produced
has led to the discovery of those reserves in the work force. While
this might have been the driving force over the past two years, there are
other reasons in our economy that speak for a stronger participation of
women. For any society it should hold true that its members should be able
to participate in shaping, operating and controlling it, and defining its
standards and values. In our current society much of this is performed
and defined over technology and women have an insignificant input into
the process. How can the technological basis for safety and medical care
for children and the elderly be (almost) solely controlled by men while
the responsibility for these groups lay (almost) solely in the hands of
women? Similarly women have a strong impact on health and education in
general, and still have (almost) no part in defining the technological
basis for either. Our society misses out on new ideas and useful products
that would impact its members in a very positive way if we had more women
involved in the process. Any process that is singly based on the ideas
of one gender but produces for two genders will be too narrow in scope.
Therefore it should be a desire for the society to produce more technologically
interested and knowledgeable women. The question of how to perform this
task is harder to answer.
4.3 How to Include More Women
The interest of women (generally speaking) in any technology related
subject is characterized by a broad view of how that technology can be
used and how it impacts humans. Pursuing a narrow technological topic into
its very depth (such as becoming an expert in Java) is rarely in the interest
of young girls, while developing a school newspaper with the use of newest
and most up-to-date technology conveying critical insights into life at
and outside school may be of great interest. Computer science at high school
level must therefore keep its topics broad enough to draw interest from
both genders.
Gender separation in high school has produced good results in the past
in drawing girls into computer science and engineering. Many of the women
now on an advanced career path in the areas of computer science and engineering
had sprung from girls-only schools, and had received education in math
and sciences among their own gender. With the popularity of girls-only
schools dropping, girls were educated in math, sciences and computer science
under the same value system boys appreciated in these areas. The consequence
of this (among other reasons) was the decline in the number of girls pursuing
a university degree in technological areas. To oppose this trend, high
schools are again offering gender separated courses. Such settings allow
the development of interest in math, sciences and computer science within
a value system girls appreciate, if well guided. Such a setting
also allows women mentors from universities and industries to address girls
among themselves to correct any misconception of computer science related
jobs or inform about entry level abilities
for a university degree in computer science. Universities and businesses
also offer special workshops for girls to learn methods and tools of the
trade leading to more self-confidence in using and defining technology.
It is through such programs that the percentage of women in computer science
programs has been increasing again. Similar gender separation has worked
well at the university, where the most crucial time for it seems to be
the entry level courses, in particular programming courses. Women-only
university programs in computer science have also shown to be attractive
for the purpose.
It seems that once the notion of narrow mindedness of computer
science is vanishing in the mind of women, their interest for technology
increases. The ATLAS program at the University of Colorado had continuously
above 50% women in their programs, at peak times even 68%. Both here described
courses "Technology for the Community" and "Pictures in
a Computer" hosted a majority of women. Access to girls in high school
can therefore be used to break down prejudices and will often lead them
into computer science programs as long as the computer science programs
at the universities are broad in their view and allow for an inclusion
of application in their curriculum.
5 Conclusions
Some aspects of computer science education at the university level will
be affected by the economy of technology. The here discussed issues are
- at least to a certain extend - independent of the ups and downs of technology
stock. It is continually necessary to apply changes to the content of our
courses taught at the University in a computer science curriculum, currently
these changes are well documented by the [Curricula
2001] Committee. Curricula that support breadth in computer science
have the advantage of reducing service load to the computer science department,
fitting more knowledge and professional skills into the curriculum, and
of increasing the amount of women in computer science.
Acknowledgements
This paper is dedicated to my teacher and mentor Professor Dr. Dr. h.c.
Hermann Maurer who taught me more than twenty years ago the fundamental
issues of computer science that I can still build upon today and has since
inspired me to think about a wide varieties of topics on and off computer
science.
I want to thank the University of Paderborn for granting me a sabbatical
to take time to pursue the topic of education in computer science. I also
want to thank the University of Colorado at Boulder for opening their doors
to me to let me look at their education programs. Of particular help to
this paper were Professor Gerhard Fischer, Dr. Kathy Garvin-Doxas, Professor
and Assoc. Vice Chancellor Bobby Schnabel, and especially Professor Liz
Jessup. The most essential help to write this paper was given to me by
Ingrid Fischer who understood that a women researcher needed a school for
her son, (free) babysitting facilities and plenty of other help to organize
work and family in a provisional environment. I wholeheartedly thank all
of these people.
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