TITLE: SIGCSE Day One -- What Should Everyone Know about Computation?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 11, 2010  7:47 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
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   <FONT SIZE="-1"><EM>[A transcript of the
   <A HREF="http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2010/">
      SIGCSE 2010</A>
   conference:
   <A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-03.html#e2010-03-10T19_40_55.htm">
      Table of Contents</A>]
   </EM></FONT >

This afternoon session was a nice follow up to the
<A HREF="">
   morning session</A>,
though it had a focus beyond the interaction of
computation and the sciences:  What should every
liberally-educated college graduate know about
computation?  This almost surely is not the course we
start CS majors with, or even the course we might
teach scientists who will apply computing in a
technical fashion.  We hope that every student
graduates with an understanding of certain ideas
from history, literature, math, and science.  What
about computation?

Michael Goldweber made an even broader analogy in
his introduction.  In the 1800s, knowledge about
farming was pervasive throughout society, even among
non-farmers.  This was important for people, even
city folk, to understand the world in which they
lived.  Just as agriculture once dominated our culture,
so does technology now.  To understand the world in
which they live, people these days need to understand
computation.

Ultimately, I found this session disappointing.  We
heard a devil's advocate argument against teaching
any sort of "computer literacy"; a proposal that we
teach all students what amounts to an applied,
hand-waving algorithms course; and a course that
teaches abstraction in contexts that connects with
students.  There was nothing wrong with these talks
-- they were all entertaining enough -- but they
didn't shed much new light on what is a difficult
question to answer.

Henry Walker did say a few things that resonated
with me.  One, he reminded us that there is a
difference between <EM>learning about science</EM>
and <EM><STRONG>doing</STRONG> science</EM>.  We
need to be careful to design courses that do one
of these well.  Two, he tried to explain why
computer science is the right discipline for
teaching problem solving as a liberal art, such
as how a computer program can illustrate the
consequences specific choices, the interaction
of effects, and especially the precision with
which we must use language to describe processes
in a computer program.  Walker was the most
explicit of the panelists in treating programming
as fundamental to what we offer the world.

In a way unlike many other disciplines, writing
programs can affect how we think in other areas.
A member of the audience pointed out CS also
fundamentally changes other disciplines by creating
new methodologies that are unlike anything that
had been practical before.  His example was the way
in which Google processes and translates language.
Big data and parallel processing have turned the
world of linguistics away from Chomskian approach
and toward statistical models of understanding and
generating language.
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