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The NSF/IEEE-TCPP Parallel and Distributed Computing curriculum guidelines released in 2012 (PDC12) is an effort to bring more parallel computing education to early computer science courses. It has been moderately successful, with the inclusion of some PDC topics in the ACM/IEEE Computer Science curriculum guidelines in 2013 (CS13) and some coverage of topics in early CS courses in some universities in the U.S. and around the world. A reason often cited for the lack of a broader adoption is the difficulty for instructors who are not already knowledgable in PDC topics to learn how to teach those topics and align their learning objectives with early CS courses. There have been attempts at bringing textbook chapters, lecture slides, assignments, and demos to the hands of the instructors of early CS classes. However, the effort required to plow through all the available materials and figure out what is relevant to a particular class is daunting. This paper argues that classifying pedagogical materials against the CS13 guidelines and the PDC12 guidelines can provide the means necessary to reduce the burden of adoption for instructors. In this paper, we present CAR-CS, a system that can be used to categorize pedagogical materials according to well- known and established curricular guidelines and show that CAR-CS can be leveraged 1) by PDC experts to identify topics for which pedagogical material does not exist and that should be developed, 2) by instructors of early CS courses to find materials that are similar to the one that they use but that also cover PDC topics, 3) by instructors to check the topics that a course currently covers and those it does not cover.
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Computer Science Curriculum Trends
Since the 1960s, the ACM has provided routinely updated guidelines for what concepts constitute a computer science curriculum, with the latest version currently in development in 2023. These guidelines have traditionally provided a model curriculum from which universities can choose to adopt or modify for their own purposes. What is unclear, however, is to what degree schools follow the curriculum recommendations that the ACM provides. While most faculty and students likely have knowledge of their own institution's curriculum, as well as what courses are offered at a small selection of other schools, the goal of the work presented in this poster is to distill a cohesive view of what computer science curriculums in their second and third years look like across a broad range of universities across a range of institutions. Our goal with this work was to answer the following question: What do computer science course requirements look like at a wide range of different institutions? We believe the work will help those who are trying to develop curriculum changes within their own institutions and aims to provide a more cohesive view of what trends and patterns exist in course offerings and degree requirements for computer science in the second and third years across a wide range of universities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2044179
- PAR ID:
- 10510971
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE
- ISSN:
- 979-8-4007-0423-9
- ISBN:
- 9798400704246
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1732 to 1733
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland OR USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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