Goals for computer science education in the 1980s

The nature of computing, and hence of computer science, is changing rapidly. Many topics that now seem interesting will be obsolete or irrelevant within ten years, and our perspective on other topics will change. If a curriculum designed now is to remain effective through 1990 or beyond, we must try to understand the forces that are shaping the field and to anticipate the roles that computing and computer science will play in the future. At Carnegie-Mellon, a group of eight faculty and graduate students is designing a new undergraduate computer science curriculum. We began by examining the trends that will affect the field over the next decade and the new phenomena and issues that may arise. From this basis we are developing a new curriculum without prior assumptions drawn from existing curricula. In this talk I will discuss our view of current trends in computer science and the roles that colleges and universities must play over the next decade.