Toward computer science curricular guidelines 2023 (CS2023)
Rajendra K. Raj, Amruth N. Kumar · ACM Inroads · 2022
W hat should the curriculum of undergraduate computer science programs be in the 2020s?What are the best curricular practices in creating and sustaining such programs?Since the late 1960s, in almost every decade, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has created successive curricular guidelines for computer science to help answer these questions, with the IEEE-Computer Society collaborating on the effort since the 1990s.The latest iteration-Computer Science Curricula 2023 (CS2023)-is being carried out by a joint task force of three leading computing professional societies.This article presents a preview of this effort including its vision, structure, and status, and invites readers to contribute to and improve CS2023 before it is finalized. BACKGROUNDTo assist computing educators navigate the fast-evolving discipline of computer science (CS), several successive curricular guidelines have been published over the last 50 years.The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) published the first of these guidelines, Curriculum 68 [6], followed by Curriculum 78 [7] that distinguished between core and elective CS courses.ACM teamed up with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-Computer Society (IEEE-CS) to produce subsequent revisions, starting with Computing Curricula 1991 [2].Computing Curricula 2001 [4] focused solely on CS, while other disciplines such as computer engineering and software engineering were spun off into their own volumes.Computing Curricula 2001 was followed by an interim revision in 2008 [3] and a complete revision in 2013 called Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) [5].Many computer science programs across the world have used these guidelines, in part or in whole, to develop their programs.Computer Science Curricula 2023 (CS2023) is the next decennial revision of CS curricular guidelines.The revision has been led by a Joint Task Force of ACM and IEEE-CS, and for the first time, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), given the increased emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in undergraduate CS.This effort was launched in early 2021 and is planned for release by the end of 2023.