Is computer science education in crisis?
Hyacinth S. Nwana · ACM Computing Surveys · 1997
Introduction Computer science is a very young discipline, and a controversial, much-maligned and misunderstood one - even amongst computer scientists. Some have questioned the raison d'être for computer science and some employers mistrust or dislike computer science education. Some (in many cases, themselves computer scientists) debunk it and even go as far as questioning its very existence! It leads me in this paper to examine briefly why computer science education may be in crisis. The breakdown of this short paper is as follows. Section 2 reports on the background to this paper. Section 3 presents a worrying criticism of the discipline. Section 4 concludes the paper and raises a research question which could serve as the basis for an empirical investigation. 2 Background Back in 1974, D. L. Fisher, then head of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Leicester in the UK, wrote a paper entitled `Computer Science: a suitable