Community Engagement by ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Task Force on Computer Science Curricular Revision

Ramapo College Of New Jersey, Mahwah NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by providing travel funding to support the community engagement activities of the CS202X Steering Committee. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-Computer Society (IEEE-CS) have a long history of sponsoring efforts to establish international curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. This has been done on a roughly ten-year cycle starting with the publication of Curriculum 68. The curriculum guidelines describe a “competency framework” that addresses knowledge areas representing a body of material for computer science degree programs that capture high-level competencies, skills, and dispositions. The ACM/IEEE-CS curricular guidelines have become the standard for computing curricula across the country and globally. The guidelines are updated regularly with the aim of keeping computing curricula modern and relevant. The ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Curricular Revision Task (CS202X) is a joint task force constituted by ACM, IEEE-CS and the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), charged with the revision of the ACM/IEEE-CS curricular guidelines last published in 2013. The Steering Committee of the CS2020X task force consists of eight ACM members, eight IEEE-CS members, and two AAAI members. Steering committee members work on a volunteer basis, and each supervises an entire knowledge area. Steering Committee members will present the revisions to the knowledge area they supervise, at professional events that are most relevant to their knowledge area. This proposal will provide travel support to the members of the steering committee to engage with the communities they represent. These community outreach efforts will improve the quality of the curricular recommendations, and increase the rate of adoption of the revised curricular guidelines through focused publicity and community buy-in. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.