CRA-E SummitACM Education Board

Perspective

Eric RobertsACM Council

January 4, 2007

Structure of the ACM Education Board

• 10-member Education BoardEric Roberts (co-chair)Boots CasselPeter DenningMark GuzdialJohn Impagliazzo

Andrew McGettrick (co-chair)Jane PreyLarry SnyderHeikki Topi(vacant)• 35-member Education Council

– Also chaired by Eric Roberts and Andrew McGettrick– More broadly representative– Currently meets once a year—hoping for twice

• Supported by new ACM Education Director Alan Apt

Recent Education Board Activities

• Implemented restructuring to reduce the size of the Education Board and create a separate Education Council.• Developed a student-oriented brochure and supporting web materials to ensure that prospective students have a better understanding of the opportunities in the computing field.

• Published a total of five CC200x curriculum volumes.

• Released Version 1.0 of the ACM Java Task Force materials.

• Expanded our participation in European initiatives.

• Drafted a white paper (due out in early March) on the crisis of undersupply in the educational pipeline.

The Key Challenge

• CRA estimates that computing enrollments have fallen between 40 and 50 percent since 2000.

• A present, the developed-world economies are training far fewer people than we will need to fill the available positions.

• In the United States, there are now more jobs in the IT sector than there were at the height of the dot-com boom.

• The factors that lead to declining enrollments are complex and highly interconnected. There are no silver bullets.

• Increasingly, institutions are reacting to bolster short-term enrollments at the expense of long-term employment needs.

That there is currently a crisis in computing education is not in doubt.

McGettrick et al., SIGCSE 2007

—

Address the crisis raised by the fact that declining computing enrollments are not keeping pace with growing industry demand.

Outline for a White Paper on the Crisis

1. Overview of the crisis

2. The importance of computing

3. Reasons behind the crisis 3.1 Myths about employment opportunities 3.2 The abysmal state of high-school computer science 3.3 A general lack of understanding about the discipline and its subfields 3.4 Negative images of work (and workers) in the computing field 3.5 Students have changed in ways that decrease the appeal of CS 3.6 Introductory courses have become much more difficult 3.7 Lack of breadth and flexibility in the computing curriculum

4. Proposed initiatives

A Role for CRA-E

• The problem of declining enrollments and the resulting talent shortage is complex and multifaceted. There is room for many players working together.• The key resource that CRA provides is the participation of its large corporate members, who must play a role in resolving this crisis.

• As Andrew said in his note, it is important to proceed with care and sensitivity to ensure that the CRA effort is synergistic with other organizations and not in competition with them.

The End

Complexity and Instability• Complexity. The number of programming details that students must master has grown much faster than the corresponding number of high-level concepts.

• Instability. The rapid evolution of the field creates problems for computing education that are qualitatively different from those in most fields.

The number and complexity of topics that entering students must understand have increased substantially, just as the problems we ask them to solve and the tools they must use have become more sophisticated. An increasing number of institutions are finding that a two-course sequence is no longer sufficient to cover the fundamental concepts of programming.

Computing Curricula 2001

—

Reasons for the Decline

Myths about employment opportunities.1.

The abysmal state of high-school computer science.

2.

Negative images of work (and workers) in the computing field.

3.

Introductory courses have become much more difficult.

5.

Work in the field has become less interesting.

6.

Students have changed in ways that decrease the appeal of CS.

4.

Has anyone considered the possibility that it’s just not fun anymore?—Don Knuth, October 4,

2006

The Pace of Change • The pace of change—particularly in terms of its effect on the languages, libraries, and tools on which introductory computer science education depends—has increased in recent years.

• Individual universities and colleges can’t keep up.

• The CSTA survey of high-school teachers revealed the rapid pace of change as the most significant barrier.

Sobering Thoughts

There are more public methods in the java and javax package hierarchies than there are words in Jensen and Wirth’s Pascal User Manual and Report. The amount of text once deemed sufficient to teach the standard introductory programming language is thus no longer sufficient for a full index of the operations available today.Given the scale of modern software systems, it is typically impossible for students to develop projects as extensions to existing code frameworks. An academic term is now sufficient only to understand what is already there, leaving no time for further development.

—Don Knuth, October 11, 2006

If I had had to learn C++, I would have majored in music.

The ACM Java Task Force

The ACM Java Task Force was established in early 2004 with the following charter:

To review the Java language, APIs, and tools from the perspective of introductory computing education and to develop a stable collection of pedagogical resources that will make it easier to teach Java to first-year computing students without having those students overwhelmed by its complexity.

The Task Force released Version 1.0 of its materials in August.http://jtf.acm.org

Dangers on the Horizon

Walt Kelly—We have met the enemy and he is us.

On August 14, the following post appeared on SIGCSE-MEMBERS:

I have an idea for a panel that I’d like to organize for SIGCSE’07. I’m asking for volunteers (or nominations of others) to serve on the panel. The panel I’d like to organize would have a title something like:

“Alternative Models for a Programming-lite Computer Science Curriculum”

The theme of the panel would be to share ideas and thoughts on how we might reduce (or eliminate) the emphasis on programming within a computer science curriculum. The basic idea is to cause discussion centered on the knowledge and skills students of tomorrow will need in the global economic workspace and the implications for the CS curriculum. As more and more aspects of software development of “offshored”, what kind of curriculum would allow a student to be successful in the IT field?

Positive Initiatives • Several Education Board projects—the CC200x reports, CSTA, the brochure, and the Java Task Force—should prove helpful.

• There are many interesting ideas in the community that are showing promise:– Mark Guzdial’s “media computation” course at Georgia Tech

– Stuart Reges’s “back to basics” strategy at Washington

– Jeannette Wing’s “computational thinking” concepts

– Various interdisciplinary curricula

• Individual institutions and organizations are beginning to take much greater interest in the problem.

What Is To Be Done • Develop a comprehensive report on the enrollment crisis and the factors that contribute to it.

• Continue our efforts on the broad range of problems we face.

• Encourage experimentation in curricular strategies.

• Develop tools and materials that can be used “off the shelf.”

• Improve distribution channels for best practices.• Promote interdisciplinary curricular connections.• Welcome the participation of other groups in this effort.

• Press government and industry to support computing education.

Overview of the Crisis

• The Computing Research Association (CRA) estimates that computing enrollments have fallen between 40 and 50 percent since 2000.

• At the same time, demand from industry is increasing. In the United States, there are now more jobs in the IT sector than there were at the height of the dot-com boom.

• As present, the developed-world economies are training far fewer people than we will need to fill the available positions.

• The factors that lead to declining enrollments are complex and highly interconnected. There are no silver bullets.

• Increasingly, institutions are reacting to bolster short-term enrollments at the expense of long-term employment needs.

That there is currently a crisis in computing education is not in doubt.

McGettrick et al., SIGCSE 2007

—

Student Interest has Plummeted

Source: Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 2005

A UCLA study of students entering college shows that the number of students listing CS as a possible major has declined significantly in recent years. The total number of students is now below the pre-boom plateau and continues to fall rapidly. The number of women choosing CS majors is at an all-time low.

The Decline Has Attracted Media Attention

ON a sunny May afternoon, Brian Harvey’s introductory computer science class at the University of California convened for the last time before the final exam. By the time Dr. Harvey was full tilt into his lecture, reviewing recursive functions and binary search trees, the cavernous hall was lightly peppered with about 100 students, backpacks at their sides, a few legs slung over the backs of empty seats.

Sparse attendance is, of course, an end-of-semester inevitability. Many students viewed the lecture by Webcast, if at all. But more significantly, just 350 students signed up for the course this spring, in striking contrast to enrollment in the fall of 2000, when the same lecture hall was engorged at the start of the semester with 700 students sitting and standing in every available pocket of space. . . .

Today, empty classroom seats, like the vacant offices once occupied by high-flying start-ups, are among the unmistakable repercussions of the dot-com bust.

At the height of the Internet boom in the late 90’s, computer science talent was in such demand that recruiters offered signing bonuses to students who agreed to drop out of school. Now, spooked by layoffs and disabused of visions of overnight riches, many undergraduates are turning away from computer science as if it were somehow cursed.

Computing’s Lost Allure By KATIE HAFNER Published: May 22, 2003, Thursday

May 27, 2005

Student Interest in Computer Science PlummetsTechnology companies struggle to fill vacant positions

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Students once saw computer-science classes as their ticket to wealth. Now, as more technology jobs are outsourced to other countries, such classes are seen as a path to unemployment.

New data show students’ interest in the discipline is in a free fall. The number of newly declared computer-science majors declined 32 percent from the fall of 2000 to the fall of 2004, according to a report released this month by the Computing Research Association, which represents computer scientists in industry and academe. Another survey, from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, shows that the number of incoming freshmen who expressed an interest in majoring in computer science has plummeted by 59 percent in the last four years.

Students’ waning enthusiasm for the field worries technology companies that must work harder to fill vacant positions, as well as researchers who need a steady supply of intellectual talent to fuel scientific breakthroughs. Computer scientists are already struggling to maintain basic research despite sharply reduced financial support from government agencies.

CS is Losing Ground in High Schools

23,422

23,459 21,7

46 20,414 18,0

21

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

AP Computer Science A and AB

Number of Exams

• The CS Advanced Placement Test is the only AP test for which numbers are declining.

• In many schools, computing is seen as vocational rather than academic.

• The NCAA no longer accepts computer science courses for academic eligibility.

• Because of pressures from the NCLB Act, some high schools have eliminated CS entirely.• High-school CS teachers often feel frustrated and powerless.

Maria KlawePresident, Harvey Mudd

College(at the time, Dean at

Princeton)

Myths about Employment: An Example

Contrary to popular belief, career opportunities in computer science are at an all-time high. We’ve got to spread that message among students from a rainbow of backgrounds, or risk becoming a technological backwater.

Blue Skies Ahead for IT Jobs

BY MARIA KLAWE

December 1, 2005

All this talk about “Blue Skies” ahead just can’t hide the stark fact that Americans who don’t wish to migrate to India and/or some other off-shore haven are going to have a difficult career.Why would any smart American undergrad go into IT when companies like IBM and HP are talking of stepping up their off-shoring efforts in the coming years? They want cheap labor, no matter the real cost.

I have been very successful in IT, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it today to anyone except people who are geeks. . . .I think the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Labor are not correct.

Employment Growth Remains Strong• Although there was a slight dip in IT-sector employment after 2000, recent data show that this trend has reversed and that there are now more computing jobs than at any time in history.

• Projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate strong growth over the next decade:

Computer and information systems managers Computer specialists

Computer hardware engineers

Total, all professional-level IT occupations Total, all occupations

280 353 +26.1%

3,046 4,003 +31.4%

77 84 +10.1%

3,403 4,440 +30.5%

145,612 164,540 +13.0%

2004 2014 % change

Projected Employment 2004-2014 (in thousands)

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly Labor Review, November 2005

• Money magazine identified “software engineer” as the #1 job, anticipating employment growth of 46% over the next decade.

IT Salaries Remain High

Continuing a pattern that has been evident for decades, recent bachelor’s and master’s engineering graduates and computer science graduates at the bachelor’s level are more likely than graduates in other fields to be employed full time after graduation, and upon entering the workforce, they are rewarded with higher salaries.

Source: National Science Foundation. InfoBrief, December 2005

Among science graduates, the median annual salaries of computer and information sciences (CIS) graduates were the highest as of October 2003. CIS graduates with bachelor’s degrees earned a median annual salary of $45,000, and those with master’s degrees earned a median annual salary of $60,000.

Source: Computing Research Association, December 2005

Myths about OffshoringAll IT jobs will soon be outsourced to India and China.

1.

Good IT workers will be easy to find in the new “flatter” world.

2.

Companies will always seek the lowest-priced labor.

3.

The ACM report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software refutes these myths, but the misinformation persists.  

The Only Thing to Fear

Computing Error

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

The outsourcing of computing work overseas may not be as bad as you think. In fact, it probably isn’t bad at all. Consider one recent study that says the problem isn’t so much the competition from high-tech workers in places as far-flung as India and Romania as it is the discouragement caused by the doomsayers themselves.

The Association for Computing Machinery, the professional organization that issued the report, says that there are more information technology jobs today than at the height of the dot-com boom. While 2 to 3 percent of American jobs in the field migrate to other nations each year, new jobs have thus far more than made up for the loss.

That picture, of course, stands in contrast with the more familiar gloomy depiction of runaway outsourcing. Perhaps that explains what the report says is declining interest in computer science among American college students. Students may think, Why bother if all the jobs are in India? But the computer sector is booming, while the number of students interested in going into the field is falling.

The industry isn’t gone, but it will be if we don’t start generating the necessary dynamic work force. The association says that higher-end technology jobs—like those in research—are beginning to go overseas and that policies to “attract, educate and retain the best I.T. talent are critical” to future success. . . .

Information technology jobs won’t go away unless we let them. Computing in the past five years has become, according to the report, “a truly global industry.” In the next few years, jobs won’t just land in our laps. We have nothing to fear but the fear of competing itself.

ACM Initiatives

• The ACM has initiated, promoted, and underwritten the costs of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) to support K-12 computing education.• The ACM report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software is a critical resource in challenging popular misconceptions about the lack of jobs.

• The ACM is negotiating with the NCAA to modify the ruling disallowing academic credit for computing courses.

• The Education Board has developed a brochure and supporting web materials to ensure that prospective students have a better understanding of the opportunities in the computing field.

• The ACM Java Task Force, which was established to address the problem of complexity and instability in the tools used for introductory courses, published its Version 1.0 report in August.

Problem Taxonomy

• Static methods, most notably main.• The lack of a simple input mechanism.• The conceptual difficulty of the graphics model.• The tools for creating GUIs are inappropriate for novices.

Our literature survey and poll of the community identified the following problems as the most serious:

We fixed these problems by creating a set of five acm packages.

acm

io program utilgraphics gui

Limitations of the “Image” Explanation

• That computing and high-tech careers often have a negative image among students is undeniable.• That image was more or less the same in the late 1990s when we couldn’t keep students away. Image therefore is at best a second-order factor—well behind the perceived potential for wealth.

• There is growing evidence that the reality of computing work is just as offputting to today’s students as its image.

The Looming Crisis

Eric Roberts, SIGCSE 2004

—

Beset by the twin forces of complexity and instability, computer science education today faces an increasingly difficult challenge that threatens to become a crisis. The languages and tools we use today in introductory courses change much more rapidly than their predecessors in the early years of computer science. As a result, computer science textbooks and curricula have a shorter shelf-life and must be replaced every year or two. This instability, coupled with the increased detail complexity of the languages and tools, often makes it difficult to develop new materials before they become obsolete.

Skeptical Voices on the AP Change

Letter opposing the change in the CSAPCommunications of the ACM, June 1995

—

Pascal, the current AP language, is compact and designed around a small, coherent set of principles.  C++, in contrast, was designed to meet industrial rather than pedagogical goals. . . . At the very least, teachers and students will be forced to work with an enormously complicated tool, large portions of which will be mysterious to them. These mysteries of the language will inevitably rear their heads as students write and debug programs, and there is little experience with or understanding of how much of C++ a teacher needs to master in order to use it as a teaching tool.

—Don Knuth, October 11, 2006

If I had had to learn C++, I would have majored in music.

The March of Progress

266 pages 274 pages

911 pages

1536 pages