The College of Charleston’s Department of Computer Science celebrates Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), as designated by the U.S. House of Representatives, from December 6-12, 2009. CSEdWeek recognizes the transformative role of computing and the importance of computer science education for all students in the United States.
“The College of Charleston has an opportunity to differentiate itself by considering the role and significance of computational thinking in a liberal arts and sciences education,” says Chris Starr, computer science department chair. “This idea is not new. It originated with Alan Perlis in 1962 (the first Turing Award recipient), who said that everyone who is liberally educated should know how to program [think computationally]. But it is time to consider its implementation.”
The Department of Computer Science is seeing a growth in interest and new majors. It is the only computer science department in South Carolina to receive a S.C. Commendation of Excellence in Computer Science from national evaluators, and has the first undergraduate degree program in discovery informatics in the U.S. The department has more than $200,000 in corporate sponsorships from companies such as Exxon-Mobil. The Department of Computer Science also offers undergraduate research opportunities, full-time, paid internships, travel funding and alumni connections. Computer science alumni work with a variety of companies throughout the western world – including Facebook, Microsoft, Digital Domain, Yahoo Research and DreamWorks, to name a few.
The development of CSEdWeek is a joint effort led by the Association for Computing Machinery with the cooperation and deep involvement of the Computer Science Teachers Association (Chris Stephenson, executive director), the Computing Research Association, NCWIT, the Anita Borg Institute, the National Science Foundation, Google, Inc., Intel and Microsoft.
