Rethinking Computer Science in College
Posted by Daniel Butler Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:11:00 GMT
Rethinking CS101 is a project to develop a curriculum for the first course in computer science based around the idea of computation as interaction.
Perhaps the most fundamental idea in modern computer science is that of interactive processes. Computation is embedded in a (physical or virtual) world; its role is to interact with that world to produce desired behavior. While von Neumann serial programming is based on the idea that “computation as calculation” uses inputs at the beginning to produce outputs at the end. “Computation as interaction” treats inputs as things that are monitored and outputs as actions that are taken over the lifetime of an ongoing process. By beginning with a decomposition in terms of interacting computational processes, we can teach our students a model of the world much closer to the one that underlies the thinking of most computer professionals.
