Computational concepts, techniques, and ideas have spread through many ?traditional? disciplines in recent decades, resulting in fields such as Computational Biology and Computational Linguistics that explicitly acknowledge their computational aspects. At the same time, however, most students in such disciplines receive a relatively narrow education that does not expose them to the wide range of computational concepts and techniques pertinent to their fields of study. The University of Arizona aims to address this situation via a campus-wide collaborative effort to train students in all fields in information science and computational thinking. This project develops, implements, and evaluates core components of the undergraduate curriculum for the School of Information Sciences, Technology, and Arts (SISTA) at the University of Arizona. The vision of SISTA is to identify how ideas in computational thinking, information sciences, and technology apply across a variety of disciplines; to provide a broad foundation in information science and computational thinking for students in many majors; and to foster students? awareness of interdisciplinary relationships starting with their first year at the university. Additionally, new relationships between departments across campus will be formed by engaging faculty in contributing to seminars on issues in computational thinking in their disciplines and in bringing together and supporting multi-disciplinary faculty teams to design, implement, and teach the new courses. The model is intended to be transferable to other institutions. Results and evaluations will be broadly disseminated.
Over the past four years, the University of Arizona's CPATH-II project has developed, implemented and evaluated a completely new undergraduate curriculum for the School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts (SISTA) at the University of Arizona. The project has created, from an ambitious vision, a new kind of undergraduate curriculum in which a core body of knowledge that everyone working with digital information, computation, and communication ought to know is presented in the context of a coherent structured curriculum. The curriculum covers a wide range of topics relating to computational thinking, ranging broadly from core concepts and techniques, common to many different areas, to more advanced topics that are discipline-specific. The project set out three goals: Incorporate concepts and techniques of computational thinking into the undergraduate curriculum in the core computing fields as well as in other disciplines. Make these courses available to a wide variety of disciplines, thereby contributing to the development of a globally competitive workforce with computational thinking competencies. Create a transformative model for undergraduate education that is replicable across a variety of educational institutions. As a result of the work over the past four years, the project has achieved the following five outcomes: 1. Faculty from a wide variety of disciplines across the UA campus joined and helped develop the SISTA community, participating in instruction and research in areas where computing and computational thinking play an important role. From the start of the project, we have worked with faculty across campus to discuss the SISTA curriculum and how they can participate in course development and teaching, as well as how the curriculum might work with their existing needs. As of the end of the project, seven of SISTA's courses are regularly taught by non-SISTA faculty, and yet more faculty from other disciplines have helped with the design of SISTA courses, including faculty from Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Genetics, Philosophy, Music, the UA Racetrack Industries Program, Computer Science, Statistics, and Molecular and Cellular Biology. 2. We successfully developed, taught, evaluated, and modified when needed, the initial SISTA curriculum, consisting of the 6 core courses, 6 thematic courses, and 20 discipline-specific courses. 3. The SISTA core courses and some thematic courses have been integrated into the curriculum of a wide variety of departments across UA using idea in computational thinking as a foundation for their majors. Six SISTA courses are now either required or counted as optional core credit in 8 other majors, including eSociety, Plant Science, Pre-Nursing, Pre-Neuroscience & Cognitive Science, Nutritional Science, Microbiology, Pre-Business, and all tracks of Mathematics. ISTA 116, Statistical Foundations of the Information Age, has now been approved to count as credit for all majors with a moderate strand math requirement. Furthermore, ISTA 301 Computing and Arts and ISTA 263 Learning in the Digital Age have both been approved as general education courses. 4. Students in non-computing majors have increased knowledge of the role of computational thinking in their discipline. Students in computing majors have increased knowledge of the role of computing in solving important problems in a wider variety of disciplines. All students are more aware of the interconnections between their area of study and others focused around ideas in computational thinking and information sciences. A key finding of the a survey study conducted from spring 2011 to spring 2012 found that SISTA introductory programming course, ISTA 130, successfully emphasizes to students the ways in which computer programming and the basic techniques used by computer scientists can be used to support problem-solving in a range of disciplines, including the concept of computational thinking. The students’ ratings on the surveys suggest that, to some extent, this intended outcome was achieved with students in ISTA 130 having more awareness and understanding than students in a comparable Computer Science course. 5. The SISTA model now exists as a fully developed, implemented, and evaluated example of how to use ideas in computational thinking as a foundation for transformative, interdisciplinary undergraduate education. Over the four years of the project, SISTA has attracted a wide range of students from across 14 colleges at the University of Arizona, some taking one or two classes, a large number of minors, double-majors, and those solely majoring in either of SISTA's two bachelors programs (BA and BS). After 3 and a half years of the existence of SISTA's two undergraduate majors, we now have 181 majors, 33 minors, 29 have graduated with SISTA Bachelor's degrees, and so far for 2014 we anticipate an addition 21 graduating.
