Communications of the ACM

DOI: 10.1145/2492007.2492009
Vinton G. Cerf
computer science Education—
Revisited

ACM members span a remarkable period in the history of computing. We can point to Kelly Gotlieb, chair or co-chair of the ACM Awards committee for over 20 years, who joined ACM in 1949 when it was two years old! Next to Kelly, I feel like a newbie, having joined in 1967. And there are the most recent members, who joined us just this year, many as a result of our international initiatives.

cupy the thoughts of many of our colleagues.

But what about people who have no intention of entering the field? Shouldn’t they have some idea of how programming works? How operating systems work? How networks and their layered protocols work?

Among the initiatives that ACM has been pursuing is to make computer sci-

in many advanced
programs, it is a
requirement to have
a certain number
of credits in science.
it is acm’s position
that computer science
should have
equal standing.

computer science should have equal standing. Moreover, the curriculum should include some serious exposure, inter alia, to programming, systems, languages, and computer architecture. The idea is not necessarily to turn students into professional computer engineers and scientists, but to expose them to the richness of computer science and to help them appreciate the potential nascent in computers and programmable systems.

A detailed report on this topic can be found at http://csta.acm.org/Advoca-cy_Outreach/sub/Inroads_Stephenson-Wilson.pdf. I strongly urge you to read this report and then to explore ACM’s website page on education: http://www. acm.org/education.

Reforming K– 12 education to incorporate serious computer science seems vital to producing an informed public that has a deeper appreciation for the power of computing than video games and social networking. There are, no doubt, countless opportunities for computing professionals to engage in this effort, by lending their support and time to the effort to reform K– 12 curriculum content and to make visible to young people the excitement of discovering what computing can accomplish. The discipline of writing and debugging software, of creating simulations or interactive applications has the potential to draw many into the profession, or at least to provide even more with a sense of the core role computing is playing and will play in the decades ahead.

As the Internet of Things becomes reality and software appears in every appliance, building, and vehicle, we have a societal interest in promoting understanding of and interest in our discipline.