Computer Science Education In The 21st Century

In this a collection of scholarly essays, leading computer science educators ponder the effects of rapid technological change on computer education and share their predictions and concerns about the future, with an eye toward the year 2020.

The world is experiencing unprecedented rapidity of change, originating from pervasive technological developments. These developments are fundamentally reliant on the changing face of computing. Computers are a near-ubiquitous feature on the modern social landscape. Such ubiquity enables rapid propagation of changes emerging from within computing as a family of disciplines. What, then, is the relevance of such changes to education of future computer professionals and computer scientists? This book considers the effects of such rapid change from within computing disciplines, by allowing computing educationalists to deliver a considered verdict on the future of their discipline. The targeted future, the year 2020, was chosen to be distant enough to encourage authors to risk being visionary, while being close enough to ensure some anchorage to reality. The result is a scholarly set of contributions expressing the visions, hopes, concerns, predictions and analyses of trends of the future of a discipline that continues to impact greatly on the wider community. One of the interesting aspects of asking people to consider the future is the extent to which it ultimately sheds light on the present; this concept is explored by the editor in his review of the contributions as a whole.