Contributed by Mark Guzdial, mjguz@umich.edu
The University of Michigan (U-M) campus in Ann Arbor has about 50K students, with over 32K undergraduate students. The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is the largest of the 19 schools and colleges at U-M with almost 19K students. They offer over 85 majors and submajors and over 100 minors in 41 academic departments. Degrees in Computer Science at the University of Michigan are offered from the Division of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the Department of Electrical Engineering in Computer Science (EECS) in the College of Engineering. A BS in CS is available from LSA, and a BSE in CS is offered from Engineering, but both degrees are based in CSE. There are no CS faculty in LSA. The School of Information at the University of Michigan offers a BS in Information with two tracks, in data science and in user experience design. In September 2000, the Dean Anne Curzan and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Tim McKay, charged a cross-campus task force to explore the future of computing education for LSA students. The task force interviewed dozens of faculty and students, surveyed a hundred faculty, reviewed hundreds of class syllabi, and investigated our peer institutions for their innovations in computing for liberal arts and sciences. There are existing minors in Complex Systems, Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences (QMSS), and from the Digital Studies Institute (DSI). The final report of the Computing Education Task Force (available here) defined three themes for computing education in LSA, different from those in CS or Information:
LSA is now creating a Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences (PCAS), with a website available here. I am the director of the program, and Gus Evrard (Physics) is the associate director. PCAS means to serve as a hub for computing education in LSA, connect students with courses and programs, and create new courses and programs. The goal is to have majors and minors in each of the divisions of LSA (natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities) so that every LSA student can have computing education that meets their needs. Our course code is COMPFOR - COMPuting FOR. The first two courses were offered in Fall 2022:
Participatory Design Process. Since PCAS courses are meant to serve different needs than those in computing majors (e.g., described in the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula), there aren’t existing models for the courses. We are using a participatory design process with other-than-CS faculty for defining the learning objectives and student activities in these courses. In all three courses, we gathered a group of faculty volunteers whose scholarship is in computing for expression, for justice, and for discovery. These faculty worked collaboratively through design activities to define these classes. In one activity, a couple dozen learning objectives suggested in the CETF Final Report were placed on a shared whiteboard (in Padlet). While on a Zoom call, our groups of expression and justice advisors moved to the right of the board those that they felt were most important for courses in that theme, and to the left those that they felt were less important. The expression and justice final boards were very different. “Write secure, safe, and robust code” was on the left of both, though.
Scaffolded approach to teaching programming. Our advisors warned us that many of our students in the COMPFOR courses would be worried about having the necessary mathematics or programming background for a programming course. We needed to create an easy path into programming. The first two COMPFOR courses use a three-stage scaffolded model for introducing programming to students: