This CPATH Community Building (CB) project addresses disjointed educational approaches to discipline-specific computing and generic computer literacy that do not reflect the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed by engineers in the workplace.
Computing in the workplace is pervasive, involving many complex tools, many approaches to problem solving, strategic decision making, and synthesis. Engineers require mastery of computing that is applicable to higher level cognitive skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. To prepare students for pervasive computing in the workplace, educational institutions are Evolving ways think in terms of pervasive computing in education. This project builds community to support the integration of computational thinking across the engineering curricula at this institution.
This project will establish an academe-industry community in which stakeholders from a broad range of disciplines convene to discuss the challenges and opportunities inherent in transforming undergraduate computing education, and to identify and implement creative strategies to do so. To accomplish the goal of building a computational thinking thread, this Computing Across Curricula (CAC) project will bring together an interdisciplinary mix of academic and industry stakeholders to: (1) identify shortcomings in computing education within engineering disciplines, taking into account industry needs, and codify the high-order computational thinking outcomes graduates should possess for problem solving and decision making in the workplace; (2) operationalize these outcomes as pedagogical strategies that address existing shortcomings and needs; and (3) put in place an evaluative structure to determine if the pedagogical strategies have been effective at addressing the desired outcomes identified with industrial partners. This three-year project is a first step towards identifying the elements of the computational thinking thread.
The results of this project will provide a model for systemic institutional change in academic computing in engineering. Project leadership includes key members of existing academic computing units on campus as well as members of engineering faculty. Together they will implement reforms from inside of existing institutional structures. In addition, a primary thrust of this project is to establish a standing group on campus where faculty and industry leaders can come together and continue to effect change in academic computing after initial project funding has concluded. Results of the project will be communicated both locally on campus and nationally through regional and national meeting and journals. This project may serve as a national model for preparing students to work in pervasive computing workforce prepared with computational thinking integrated throughout their undergraduate education.
