How to educate a computer scientist

Abstract

What can you expect a computer science graduate to know? If you had a chance to design a modern curriculum for a computer science program, what would you emphasize? Should a curriculum designed today be different from what you studied? The answer to the question of what to teach computer scientists evolves over time as technologies, applications, and requirements change. As software technology has rapidly spread through every aspect of modern societies, the challenge of educating computer engineers has taken on new form and become more complex and urgent. In this talk, I present the outline of an educational program for a complete software engineer. A new curriculum for computer science has been developed based on these ideas and started in October 2004 at the University of Lugano in Switzerland. The program emphasizes software design and group projects beginning from the first semester. I will highlight the novelties of the curriculum with respect to traditional ones. I argue that the new century requires such a radically new approach if computer scientists are to answer the new opportunities.