What Do We Teach the Non-majors?

Contributed by John Rager, jerager@amherst.edu

Institutional and departmental context

• Institution Name: Amherst College
• Location: Amherst, MA
• Student body size: 1800 students
• Degree(s) offered: B.A.
• Department/major name: Computer science
• Number of contributing faculty: 6, rising to 7 FTE
• Number of majors annually: 40-50 majors

Facilitation

Are you willing to facilitate this discussion? Yes

Are there any others whom you would recommend as potential facilitators for this topic? No

Description

It used to be very common in CS to have specific non-major courses, often with little or no programming content. (DeMystifying the Internet was the name of one of ours.) There were always issues with them:

• Did they deflect good students from the “real” intro course?
• What should be in them?

It seems to be less common to have such courses now - there are easier programming environments - Python, Snap/Scratch; everyone “should” learn to code; we have so many majors that we don’t have the staff for such courses, etc. But the fundamental question remains:

• What are the interesting options for teaching non-majors?
• Should they learn to code?
• Should they learn data mining?
• Should they learn what a Turing machine is?
• Should the non-majors course follow the intro course, rather than being a substitute for it?

I hope that people will have ideas to share.