JCSE Online
Janury 2003
Editor’s Remarks
J. Philip East
University of Northern Iowa
Our second issue is late. I apologize for that. Even though it is late I think we still have some good reading for you. We have two articles and an editorial this time. As has been happening more often, we have an international flavor in this issue. Our two feature articles provide a curriculum analysis and a quite good exploration of the use and impact of ADTs. We also have an opinion piece on the use of the automobile analogy to illustrate the need for computing expertise.
Chris Stephenson tells us about the recently developed revision to the CS curriculum in Ontario, Canada. However, she does not just describe that set of curriculum guidelines. She places the curriculum in the context of a general model of software engineering education. Chris introduces us to Cowling's model which overviews the topics, skills, etc. that should be addressed in a software engineering educational program. Chris doesn’t suggest that we (or the province of Ontario) should be producing software engineers out of high school. Rather, her purpose appears to be to show that the developers of the curriculum actually did a pretty nice job. I know that only a few of us in SIGCS are from Canada, so the article is of more general rather than specific interest. On the other hand, every curriculum plan that we see should have some effect on our view of what our own curriculum should be. I hope you enjoy Chris’s article and are able to apply it to your own worldview.
Read
Continuing the international flavor to this issue is a piece from Israel by Bruria Haberman and Zahava Scherz. From their article, it is clear that high school computing in Israel is even more different from ours than is the computing in Canada that Chris describes. I suspect that some readers have extensive high school CS programs and can apply this article directly. However, I think we all can gain something from this article. I found Haberman and Scherz’s investigation of the use, and impact of the use, of abstract data types (ADTs) by students to be very interesting. They provide us with a rich background discussion, a good description of their research, and a good discussion of the results. It is, to me, a very good piece of research in computer science education, and well-written, too. It certainly makes me anxious to get back to teaching courses where I can make use of the implications of their work. I suspect many of you will find something that in their work will have some impact on your own thinking. Enjoy.
Read
I contributed our third piece in this issue, and I hope that won’t lead you to skip over it. The suggestion is that the automobile analogy has been used much too simplistically to indicate the need for computing education. We actually want our children and young adults to know more than "how to drive" when they get out on the roads. Similarly, it is important that our children know more than "how to use" a computer. Perhaps the much used (or misused) automobile analogy, when used more adeptly, can motivate the need for a deeper understanding of computing.
Read
I hope you enjoy these three pieces.
Keep in mind that we are always on the lookout for more articles. If you have something you’d like to say, let me know–I will work with you on it if you’d like. If you see an article that hasn’t reached our membership, let me know–I might be able to get it reprinted in JCSE Online.
Philip East
Interim Editor
east@cs.uni.edu
Note: All Web links in this issue were active as of the post date (January 10, 2003). However, the Web is volatile, and neither ISTE nor SIGCS have any control over external sites. Please contact associate editor Davis N. Smith (dsmith@iste.org) if you have a fix for a broken link.
Copyright © 2003, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.
|
