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Undergraduate Computer Science (CS) curricular guidelines have been published regularly since 1968, and the latest released in 2013. From early 2021, a task force of the ACM, IEEE-Computer Society, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has worked on a decennial revision titled the ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Computer Science 2023 Curricula (CS2023). The CS2023 task force includes a 17-member steering committee, 17 knowledge area subcommittees, and an international group of disciplinary experts. CS2023 provides curricular content – a knowledge model largely backward compatible with CS2013, supplemented by a competency model – and curricular practices, comprising articles by independent experts on program design and delivery that complement curricular content guidelines. CS2023 will inform educators and administrators on the what, why, and how to cover undergraduate CS over the next decade. Ongoing work on CS2023 has been disseminated widely over the past two years: via the task force website; presentations at computing education conferences, e.g., SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2023; articles, e.g., ACM Inroads; emails to various computing education mailing lists; gathering community feedback via surveys and special sessions; and soliciting and receiving expert blind peer reviews. Building on earlier drafts, a gamma draft was released in September 2023, with the final version due by the end of 2023. This panel examines CS2023 from different perspectives. All panelists serve on the CS2023 steering committee and have an intimate understanding of CS2023. The moderator will lay out its overall vision and structure while panelists will emphasize three major perspectives of CS education: software development fundamentals; systems development; and the increased role of societal, ethical, and professional aspects crucial to a modern CS graduate. Strong interdependencies exist between these perspectives, along with tensions arising from how much can be squeezed into a tight undergraduate CS curriculum. Attendees will take home an understanding of the approach taken by the CS2023 task force, the constraints on curriculum design, and how best to use the CS2023 guidelines to educate the next generation of CS graduates. 

Games and competitions enhance student engagement and help improve hands-on learning of computing concepts. Focusing on targeted goals, competitions provide a sense of community and accomplishment among students, fostering peer-learning opportunities. Despite these benefits of motivating and enhancing student learning, the impact of competitions on curricular learning outcomes has not been sufficiently studied. For institutional or program accreditation, understanding the extent to which students achieve course or program learning outcomes is essential, and helps in establishing continuous improvement processes for the program curriculum. Utilizing the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), a curricular assessment was conducted for an undergraduate cybersecurity program at a US institution. This archetypal competition was selected as it provides an effective platform for broader program learning outcomes, as students need to: (1) function in a team and communicate effectively (teamwork and communication skills); (2) articulate technical information to non-technical audiences (communication skills); (3) apply excellent technical and non-technical knowledge (design and analysis skills applied to problem-solving); and (4) function well under adversity (real-world problem-solving skills). Using data for both students who competed and who did not, student progress was tracked over five years. Preliminary analysis showed that these competitions made marginally-interested students become deeply engaged with the curriculum; broadened participation among women who became vital to team success by showcasing their technical and management skills; and pushed students to become self-driven, improving their academic performance and career placements. This experience report also reflects on what was learned and outlines the next steps for this work. 

The release of the Information Technology (IT) 2017 curricular guidelines provided the impetus to focus on students’ professional competencies by incorporating authentic practice into disciplinary content. Authentic practices require appropriate learning experiences such as workplace-bound experiences, employer engagement with programs via paid internships, and critical reflection on what was learned. Both professional technical and non-technical skills must be emphasized for such authenticity. However, practical assessment of the learning of professional competencies remains challenging. This paper develops such a practical assessment approach to IT competencies. It builds on the industry-led Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) that defines over 120 IT professional skills across seven levels of responsibility and experience. SFIA provides actionable and measurable activities and behaviors, which IT graduates need to demonstrate in the workplace. The paper explores the assessment of student performance on authentic, real-world tasks using a rubric-based scoring scheme supported by a systematic collection of sample student work over their time in the program. It concludes with a discussion of the validation of the proposed approach to demonstrate its practicality. 

This Innovative Practice Full Paper addresses the assessment of dispositions which, along with knowledge and skills, form the three legs of competency needed to perform a task in context, as described in recent computing curricular reports, particularly ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020). Here, dispositions in CC2020 express the behavioral characteristics of competence, such as being adaptable, collaborative, or inventive. Instructors have assessed knowledge from the start of computing programs and have paid increased attention to assessing skills in recent decades. However, dispositions and their role within competency is relatively new, with little guidance available for assessing dispositions. Lately, computing instructors have begun to understand the importance of evaluating dispositions during the performance of tasks in the real world or in the context of the industry-based global Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Hence, this paper develops a criterion-based approach for use by educators in assessing competence based on a reflective portfolio of "real-world" achievements. Building on concepts developed by the UK Institute of Coding and other recent reports, this work demonstrates how this assessment approach relates to industry-based competency frameworks such as SFIA and the European e-Competence Framework (eCF). The paper also explores using the criterion-based approach in a classroom environment to help students focus on particular dispositions. Its main contribution is to advance the competency focus in academic computing programs and future computing curricula. 

Program accreditation in medical or religious professions has existed since the 1800s while accreditation of business and engineering programs started in the early twentieth century. With this long history, these disciplines have focused on ensuring the competence of their graduates, as modern society demands appropriate expertise from doctors and engineers before letting them practice their profession. In computing, however, professional accreditation started in the last decades of the twentieth century only after computer science, informatics, and information systems programs became widespread. At the same time, although competency-based learning has existed for centuries, its growth in computing is relatively new, resulting from recent curricular reports such as Computing Curricula 2020, which have defined competency comprising knowledge, skills, and dispositions. In addition, demands are being placed on university programs to ensure their graduates are ready to enter and sustain employment in the computing profession. This work explores the role of accreditation in forming and developing professional competency in non-computing disciplines worldwide, building on this understanding to see how computing accreditation bodies could play a similar role in computing. This work explores the role of accreditation in forming and developing professional competency in non-computing disciplines worldwide, building on this understanding to see how computing accreditation bodies could play a similar role in computing. Its recommendations are to incorporate competencies in all computing programs and future curricular guidelines; create competency-based models for computing programs; involve industry in identifying workplace competencies, and ensure accreditation bodies include competencies and the assessment in their standards. 

Smart Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) have the potential to transform patient care dramatically at reduced cost. The reality, however, is that there are serious security and privacy concerns that prevent this goal from being accomplished. The vast amounts of data being generated need to be kept secure to prevent harm to patients' health and privacy. For example, a cyberattack on heart rates data could cause patients to be over- or under-prescribed, causing severe consequences, including death. In this new environment, not ensuring a proper digital chain of custody leads to digital forensics challenges that could impact a criminal or malpractice investigation. This project explores enhancements needed to ensure security and privacy when IoHT are to be used in healthcare. A model is proposed to ensure a secure digital chain of custody for IoHT using database auditing techniques. The current status of the proposed concept and future directions are also discussed. 

This is a panel presentation on the role of dispositions in computing education. 

In the past decade, academic computing curricular guidelines have shifted from specifying knowledge and occasionally technical skills to establishing the overall competence expected of graduates. For instance, Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020) guidelines identify competency as knowledge, skills, and dispositions where “dispositions” correspond to the behavioral and professional characteristics driven by employer needs and captured by industry-driven frameworks, such as the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Computing programs thus must also ensure that graduates have these characteristics to improve initial employment and long-term career prospects. This paper aims to understand and achieve consistency between academia and industry curricular frameworks. The CC2020 dispositions map to the responsibility characteristics for SFIA Level 3, the level appropriate for a new graduate. As the mapping is not one-to-one, the paper reviews the extent to which each SFIA responsibility characteristic requires and enables the CC22020 dispositions, identifying potential shortcomings and, conversely, the importance of each disposition as it supports the responsibility characteristics. The developed mapping is validated by relating the CC2020 dispositions to the SFIA behavioral factors, the principal “21st Century Skills,” and relevant competency-based educational frameworks. Thus, dispositions in competency-focused curricula map to the actual competencies sought by employers. Finally, the paper postulates that future computing curricula must further develop the CC2020 dispositions and relate them to SFIA to guide academic programs in their preparation of career-ready graduates to reduce the current “skills gap”.