Computer Science Curriculum

In recent years a tenth strand, with equal importance to programming, has emerged within the Computer Science and Information Systems discipline – that is of the legal, ethical and social nature of the computer and the Professional who makes use of the computer. With the increasing use of computers in all manner of disciplines, the correct and ethical usage of these machines and the software that runs on them becomes important. Universities are finding themselves in the business of equipping their students for life. Thus an Information Systems department within a University should prepare their students to behave ethically with the knowledge that they will learn. Various curricula are examined and a course that can be included within the Information Systems Curriculum is proposed in both a stand-alone and integrated manner. The course lists the broad topics that should be included and offers ideas for implementing the course.

This paper presents a multi-tier model for secure computing as a teaching method platform. The security model is based on establishing the trustworthiness and role of each component in a distributed computing environment: trusted users, trusted servers, trusted administrators, untrusted client, untrusted communication media and intermediate systems, etc. The model provides a basis for teaching and for program system design.

Many recent innovations in the computer science curriculum have focused on the first-year computer science courses, and much work has been done to help determine what predicts success in the first year. However, many of these investigations lack an appropriately validated assessment instrument to confirm their findings. There are several assessment instruments available to computer science faculty, but each of them is flawed, therefore making them inappropriate for the task of assessment of the first-year computer science courses. I propose to create an assessment instrument that can be administered to students during their first year of study of computer science. This instrument will be constructed using the guidelines given in Computing Curricula 2001 for programming-first introductory courses. This instrument will be assessed for its reliability and validity and administered to students in their first year of study in computer science. The creation of this instrument will enable ...

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is commonly used in Computer Science curriculum in order to teach object oriented analysis, design and programming. In this context, UML CASE tools are useful to assist in modeling and automating routine tasks. However, available ...

A Tanzanian higher education institution (Institute of Finance Management) and an Irish higher education institution (Dublin Institute of Technology) have worked in partnership to develop the final stage of a Computer Science programme to meet the specific needs of the Tanzanian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. The designed stage sits above three stages of a programme designed for the Irish ICT sector which was transplanted to the Tanzanian context. The final stage is crucial as it represents the final bridge between the employment market and the programme, which is informed by the best practice, needs and requirements of both the source and host education systems, and employment markets. This paper describes both the process which was followed and the resulting design, and carries lessons for designers of programmes in a similar transnational context.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is commonly used in Computer Science curriculum in order to teach object oriented analysis, design and programming. In this context, UML CASE tools are useful to assist in modeling and automating routine tasks. However, available tools are generally intended for use by professional developers to improve productivity and are not suitable for educational purposes. Tools

Computer science programs prepare students to construct systems. System construction requires reasoning about the interactions, capabilities, and limitations of components. A good degree program should teach students the tools that assist in these tasks. Logic is the most fundamental such tool, as industry has begun to appreciate. Software developers analyze program behavior during design, debugging, and testing. Hardware designers perform minimization and equivalence checking on circuits. Operating system designers validate routing, scheduling, and synchronization protocols. Formal logic underlies all of these activities. A solid preparation in applied logic should therefore increase students’ abilities to reason about complex systems. Unfortunately, few undergraduate computer science curricula prepare students adequately in logic. The typical student sees a few weeks of truth tables and propositional logic in a discrete mathematics course. Such a cursory introduction does not illu...

The Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science (VT CS) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (UNC SILS) have launched a curriculum development project in the area of digital libraries. Educational resources would be developed based on the ACM/IEEE-CS computing curriculum 2001. Lesson plans and modules would be developed in a variety of areas (that cover the topics of papers and conference sessions in the field), evaluated by experts in those areas, and then pilot tested in CS and LIS courses. An analysis of papers on digital library-related topics from several corpora was performed, to identify the areas in which more and less work has already been performed on these topics; this analysis would guide the initial stages of this curriculum development

Information Assurance and computer security are serious worldwide concerns of governments, industry, and academia. Computer security is one of the three new focal areas of the ACM/IEEE's Computer Science Curriculum update in 2008. This ACM/IEEE report describes, as the first of its three recent trends, "the emergence of security as a major area of concern." The importance of Information Assurance and Information Assurance education is not limited to the United States. Other nations, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other members from NATO countries and the EU, have inquired as to how they may be able to establish Information Assurance education programs in their own country. The goal of this document is to explore the space of various existing Information Assurance educational standards and guidelines, and how they may serve as a basis for helping to define the field of Information Assurance. It was necessary for this working group to s...