Our Project

Expanding computing across the higher education curriculum and the training of a computing-savvy workforce has been recognized by the NSF as crucial to the nation’s continued prosperity and security. In this project we focus on using liberal studies courses – part of the education of the vast majority of undergraduates – as a vehicle for the teaching of computational thinking.

The project’s goal is to build a consensus across disciplines toward incorporating computational thinking within liberal studies courses. To achieve this consensus, the project leaders will develop and nurture a community of select faculty across different colleges and departments of DePaul University as well as several other Chicago-area institutions. This community of faculty will work together to develop a framework that can be used by all faculty, including those without formal training in information technology, to understand and integrate computational thinking into Liberal Studies courses at DePaul and elsewhere.

"Computational Thinking Across the Curriculum” is a project funded by the National Science Foundation under the CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) initiative. The project will run from July 2008 until July 2010.

Publications

O. Astrachan, J. Peckham, and A. Settle, The Present and Future of Computational Thinking, presented at SIGCSE 2009: The 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Chattanooga, Tennessee, March 2009

P. Curzon, J. Peckham, A. Settle, and H. Taylor, Computational Thinking: On Weaving It In, to be presented at ITiCSE ’09: 14th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Paris, France, July 2009.