Computer education, past, present, and future

Changing aims of computing education: a historical survey

“…ACM's Computing Curriculum '68 was aimed explicitly at academic programs in computing and not at industrial training, so upon its publication it was immediately criticized for being too academic, too theoretical, and too narrowly focused. Its creators came mostly from a mathematical background (Atchison, 1981), which clearly showed in the end result. One critic complained that the purpose of computing education should not be to "turn out recursively new generations of academicians" (Wishner, 1968); another criticized Curriculum '68 for involving too little laboratory work (Hamming, 1969); and computing education in general was accused of "deep nostalgia for mathematics", where people would like to label themselves mathematicians but certainly were not (Hammer, 1970).…”

“…There was a consensus that computing education could not be based on tinkering and toying with programs, but although no alternative curriculum had demonstrated an educational high ground either, practically oriented players, such as businesses, often found the competing IEEE and DPMA curricula to be better suited for their needs (Ensmenger, 2001). All of this was taking place in the context of the continued desire of computing to be administratively independent of mathematics departments (Atchison, 1981).…”

“…Hoare, 1969), but many practicing programmers felt that the connection between programming competence and mathematical skills was weak (Glaser, 1974;Kandel, 1972;Spier, 1974) and that one could easily become an expert programmer without any knowledge of Turing machines, automata theory, or formal verification. The perceived need for mathematics in computing curricula slowly gravitated away from traditional mathematics topics towards discrete mathematics (Atchison, 1981).…”

“…Computing education was the "in" thing, it was supported by UNESCO, EEC, and other major players, and it was gradually moving into various levels of school education (Atchison, 1981;Guzdial, 2015). Although many initiatives primarily involved computer literacy (Atchison, 1981;Guzdial, 2015;Tedre & Denning, 2016), there were also epistemologically and pedagogically radical ideas, such as Papert's (1980) and Beynon and Russ's empiricist views (Tedre & Denning, 2016). However, teacher training was an obstacle and there was a dire lack of computer-and computing-literate teachers in primary and secondary schools (Atchison, 1981).…”

An upper level computer science curriculum

“…Alternatives to calculus have been proposed [3,7,9], but generally at the expense of providing a solid mathematics foundation for a broadly based program such as is presented in this paper.…”