NEW: CUE.NEXT invites proposals for short, focused efforts aimed at shaping innovative CUE ideas and activities.  For more information see: 

Computing and Computer Science have become relevant to undergraduate education in all disciplines. Academic institutions are challenged to meet the demand of the growing and increasingly diverse student body seeking to learn more about computing, computer science, and the role of computation in their own disciplines. Courses and curricula aimed at teaching the fundamental technologies of Computer Science to CS majors often do not meet the needs of this wider student audience.

There is currently no consensus on how to design computing courses or how to structure curricula aimed at teaching the fundamentals of CS and computing to students and subsequently using computing effectively in the context of the other disciplines. The goal of the CUE.NEXT workshops is to initiate a national dialog on the role of computing in undergraduate education. Computing educators and CS departments, as well as colleagues and academic units representing other stakeholder disciplines, will work together to understand and address the challenges.

Questions to be explored

Keeping in mind that one purpose of these workshops is to develop some consensus on the key issues in front of us, examples of questions to be explored by CUE.NEXT workshop participants include:

  • What collaborations between CS and other disciplines can lead to and encourage new curricula and new courses?
  • How can non-computing programs effectively incorporate computing and successfully graduate students in four years?
  • How can we ensure that students with diverse backgrounds and interests are — and feel — welcome in their study of computing and CS?
  • How can bottleneck concepts that often stymie students of computing be successfully communicated to students in other disciplines?
  • How can knowledge of how to teach computing and CS in conjunction with one discipline be leveraged to better teach computing and CS in the context of other disciplines?
  • What recommendations and templates can guide departments, colleges, and  institutions as they seek to integrate computing into undergraduate education?
  • What new research and teaching opportunities may emerge for both CS and other stakeholder disciplines?

We welcome your input in further developing the questions to be addressed.

Our partners

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number CNS-1944777. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.