Published In
Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2021
Subjects
Computer architecture
Abstract
There is no doubt that the body of knowledge spanned by the computing disciplines has gone through an unprecedented expansion, both in depth and breadth, over the last century. In this position paper, we argue that this expansion has led to a crisis in computing education: quite literally the vast majority of the topics of interest of this conference are not taught at the undergraduate level and most graduate courses will only scratch the surface of a few selected topics. But alas, industry is increasingly expecting students to be familiar with emerging topics, such as neuromorphic, probabilistic, and quantum computing, AI, and deep learning. We provide evidence for the rapid growth of emerging topics, highlight the decline of traditional areas, muse about the failure of higher education to adapt quickly, and delineate possible ways to avert the crisis by looking at how the field of physics dealt with significant expansions over the last centuries.
Rights
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1145/3457388.3458673
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/35992
Citation Details
Christof Teuscher. 2021. A golden age for computing frontiers, a dark age for computing education? In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers (CF '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 140–143. DOI: 10.1145/3457388.3458673
Description
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.