[ILUG] Computer science education

[Chris Higgins]

On Fri,  6 Feb 2004 08:07:57 +0000
Niall O Broin <niall at linux.ie> wrote:

> >the snow with no shoes and bring a lump of coal to heat the
> >classroom.
> 
> Coal ! Coal ? - us would have killed to have coal. Not that it would
> have done us any good, because there was no fireplace in the ditch.

You got a ditch ? Lucky so and so.. You probably even got 
to sit on some nice soft mud. Not hard rocks like we had.
Would have killed for some soft squidgy mud. 


To bring this a little back towards the thread, there seems
to be lots of confusion over what CS is / was.. I think what
we are seeing is all the different disciplines being lumped
under the CS umbrella - to pull a few out ( and based on 
my viewpoint)

Computer Science is algorithms 
   ( better, faster, smarter) ways of doing things.
   - Sorting / Scheduling / Caching etc..
   In a sense it's a purely theoretical discipline. 
   Students should be quite happy with a turing machine
   and a roll of tape. From that point of view
   maths is critical ( but not addition/multiplication
   maths, or even differentiation/integrations...)
   Stuff like graph theory, prime numbers, proof of
   theorems etc..
   
Software Engineering is programming languages
   ( programming languages, APIs, compilers, 
     performance tuning, security )

Computer Applications is end user apps
   ( Calc, Writer, Draw, Impress )

They always stick in some hardware, but that seems to be
mostly a throw back to the electrical/electronic heritage
of the original founders of more computer science departments.


Some of the Universities have "better" mixes of these, some
are leaning more towards one than the other. The money
for the colleges seems to be in the pure science research
side - the money for students is in a good grounding in
the software engineering side ( so you can earn a crust ).
So it's down to the colleges finding an appropriate mix. 



--

Chris Higgins                              Cisco Learning Partner
Darach Technology Ltd                      tel: +353-1-6204370
email: chris.higgins at darach.ie          fax: +353-1-6204371
http://www.darach.ie