Understand the Emerging Demands of Computing Education for Non-CS Major Students
Meng Han, Zhigang Li, Jing He, Xin Tian · 2019
In this poster, the investigators report their experience in teaching five computer science courses that were developed specifically for non-CS major students. These courses were taught in a four-year period in a public research institution in the South-eastern region of the United States. The whole study demonstrates an emerging demand for computing education from non-CS major students. The investigators collected data from both the students and the instructors in the hope to seek empirical answers to the questions of why there are such emerging demands for computing education, where are the demands coming from, and what non-CS major students are looking for in computer science classes. The answers to these questions can help shed the light on what educators should provide to the students in these courses. Based on the analysis of the data gathered, the investigators proposed a list of four recommendations to help guide fellow educators in the development of non-CS major computer science courses: (a) focus on high-level programming and modeling with low syntactic overhead; (b) broaden the breath of application demonstration to help non-CS major students to apply the knowledge to their specific domain; (c) introduction of computational tools; (d) hands on projects that match students' background and interests.