ACM/IEEE-CS Computer Science Curricula 2013 - Strawman draft

The ACM/IEEE-CS Computer Science Curricula 2013 has recently been released the first public review. The Strawman draft is not a complete document as some additions, most importantly exemplar curriculums, are yet to be made. It is however ready for public comments on the content that is there. This is a major first step and we hope there will be some positive and constructive discussions about this curricula. It is useful to remind people what this is not though. It is not the recommendations for Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Information Technology or Software Engineering. There are separate documents for all of those fields which you can find on the ACM Curricula Recommendations page. There you can also find the Computing Curricula 2005: The Overview Report which provides undergraduate curriculum guidelines for all five defined sub-disciplines of computing.

The importance of this document to faculty of higher education is, one hopes, obvious but these are not the only people it should be important to. People in industry should be aware of what a computer science degree means and how it is different from the other degrees in computing. Secondary school educators should be able to explain to their students what they are “getting into” but should also see this document as a chance to learn what areas of computer science are core to the field of study. The comment period opens soon and I’ll post about that when it happens. For now though the document is out there and you can start reading it. It’s good stuff.

Download the draft CS Curricula 2013

8 FREE Online Computer Science Courses for Beginners and Advances Users

Many people want to learn computer science, but not many can afford to do so at the best institutions. Fortunately many of the best institutions in the world are opening up their courses so you can take a course from Stanford, MIT or Harvard simply by going online and learning at your own pace. Here are 8 ways you can take advantage of this.

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The Google Science Fair

The Google Science Fair is an online science competition seeking curious minds from the four corners of the globe. Anybody and everybody between 13 and 18 can enter. All you need is an idea. A world-class science fair calls for world-class prizes. They include once-in-a-lifetime experiences like a scientific trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic Explorer, unique scholarships and real-life work opportunities in iconic science centers of excellence like CERN in Switzerland. There’s also a special Science in Action prize, sponsored by Scientific American. There will be 90 regional finalists who will each receive a Google Chromebook*. 15 finalists, selected from these regional finalists, will be flown to Mountain View California for a chance to compete to become a finalist winner in three (13-14, 15-16, 17-18) age categories. One of the 3 finalists winners will be selected as the Grand Prize winner which includes: A National Geographic Expedition, Google scholarship worth $50,000, +++ All entries must be submitted by 1 April 2012.

See the details

Watch the 1 hr 6m video of 2011 final event in its entirety, with an introduction by Eric Schmidt, hosted by Mariette DiChristina of Scientific American, with appearances and talks from Vint Cerf, Dean Kamen and Tierney Thys.

The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies

This is a collection of bibliographies of scientific literature in computer science from various sources, covering most aspects of computer science. The bibliographies are updated weekly from their original locations such that you'll always find the most recent versions here. The collection currently (as on Apr 2011) contains more than 6 millions of references (mostly to journal articles, conference papers and technical reports), clustered in about 1500 bibliographies. More than 600 000 references contain cross references to citing or cited publications. More than 3 million of references contain URLs to an online version of the paper. Abstracts are available for more than 1.7 million entries. There are more than 2000 links to other sites carrying bibliographic information. Access it