V

viewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1506409.1506420
education
Teaching Computing
to everyone

Studying the lessons learned from creating high-demand computer science courses for non-computing majors.

SeVeral CompUTIng programs in the U.S. are developing new kinds of introductory computing courses for non-computing majors, some with support from the NSF CPATH program. At Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), we are entering our 10th year of teaching computing to every undergraduate on campus. Our experience gained during the last decade may be useful to others working to understand how to satisfy the growing interest in computing education across the academy.

 

computing in General education

photograph by Judson Collier

In fall 1999, the faculty at Georgia Tech adopted a requirement that all students must take a course in computing. We modified the academic year from quarters to semesters, which gave the campus the opportunity to rethink the curriculum and our general education requirements. Russ Shackelford, Rich Leblanc, Kurt Eiselt, and the College of Computing’s then-dean, Peter Freeman, convinced the rest of Georgia Tech that all students who graduated from an Institute of Technology should know computing. We started before publication of the National Research Council report Being Fluent with Information Technology, ³ though that report significantly influenced implementation.

The new requirement wasn’t a hard sell. Faculty in the College of Engineering had wanted to implement a programming requirement for their stu-

dents, but couldn’t decide who should teach it. The creation of the College of Computing in 1990 answered the question of whose job it was to teach computer science at Georgia Tech. Faculty in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts (and in other colleges) embraced the new requirement. Computing was increasingly relevant for their disciplines, and was a value-added requirement for their graduates. The campus administration was kept abreast and involved throughout to maintain support. The new general education requirement was defined as an outcome—students would be able “to make algorithmic and data structures choices” when writing programs. That simple phrase de-

scribes a serious introductory course.

 

teaching everyone in one class For the first four years of the requirement, only a single class met the requirement: CS1321. There were several reasons for having only a single course. While we were already teaching approximately two-thirds of the students at Georgia Tech (because several of the largest degree programs already required computing), teaching everyone on campus meant well over 1,200 students a semester. The immensity of the task was daunting—splitting our resources over several courses seemed a bad start-up strategy. We were also explicitly concerned about creating

 

the christopher W. Klaus advanced computing Building on the Georgia tech campus is home to the institute’s college of computing and School of electrical and computer engineering.