Computing Curricula 2013: Computer Science – Update on the Strawman Report from the ACM/IEEE-CS Task Force Mehran Sahami (moderator) Stanford University Computer Science Department sahami@cs.stanford.edu Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas San Pablo Catholic University School of Computer Science ecuadros@ucsp.edu.pe Steve Roach University of Texas at El Paso Computer Science Department sroach@utep.edu David Reed Creighton University Department of Journalism, Media & Computing davereed@creighton.edu Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education General Terms Documentation, Design, Standardization. Keywords Computing Curricula 2013: Computer Science, CS 2013. 1. SUMMARY Beginning over 40 years ago with the publication of Curriculum 68 [1], the major professional societies in computing—ACM and IEEE-Computer Society—have sponsored various efforts to establish international curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. As the field has grown and diversified, so too have the recommendations for curricula. There are now guidelines for Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Information Technology, and Software Engineering in addition to Computer Science. These volumes are updated regularly with the aim of keeping computing curricula modern and relevant. In the Fall of 2010, work on the next volume in the series, Computer Science 2013 (CS2013), began. Considerable work on the new volume has already been completed and a first draft of the CS2013 report (known as the Strawman report) will be complete by the beginning of 2012. This panel seeks to update and engage the SIGCSE community in providing feedback on the Strawman report, which will be available shortly prior to the SIGCSE conference. The rapid evolution and expansion of the computing field and the growing number of topics in computer science has made regular revision of curricular recommendations necessary. The integration of computing with other disciplines creates additional opportunities for defining innovative computing curricula. Balancing this topical growth with the need to keep recommendations realistic and implementable in the context of undergraduate education is particularly challenging. As a result, it is important to engage the broader computer science education community in a dialog to better understand new opportunities, local needs, and novel successful models of computing curriculum. The last complete Computer Science curricular volume was released in 2001 [3] and was followed by a review effort that concluded in 2008 [2]. While the review helped to update some of the knowledge units in the 2001 volume, it was not aimed at producing an entirely new curricular volume and deferred some of the more significant questions that arose at the time. The Computer Science 2013 effort seeks to provide a new volume reflecting the current state of the field. In particular, it highlights promising future directions through revisiting and redefining the knowledge areas in CS, rethinking the essentials necessary for a CS curriculum, and identifying working exemplars of courses and curricula along these lines. The high-level themes on which the CS2013 effort is based include: • The “Big Tent” view of CS – As CS expands to include more multi-disciplinary work and new programs of the form ―Computational X‖ are developed, it is important to embrace an outward looking view in computing that sees CS as a discipline actively seeking to work with and integrate into other disciplines. • Managing the size of the curriculum – Although the field of Computer Science continues to grow unabated, it is simply not feasible to proportionately expand the size of the curriculum. As a result, CS2013 seeks to re-evaluate what are considered essential topics in computing so as to make room for new topics without requiring more total instructional hours than the prior CC2001 guidelines. The circumscription of curriculum size in necessary to promote more flexible models for curricula without losing the essence of a rigorous CS education. • Actual course exemplars as opposed to stylized course guidance – CS2001 took on the significant challenge of providing descriptions of stylized courses incorporating the knowledge units defined in that report. While this was a valiant effort, it was felt in retrospect that such course guidance did not have much impact on actual course design. As a result, CS2013 plans to take a different approach: identifying existing Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). SIGCSE’12, February 29–March 3, 2012, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010.