Open Question around Mathematics in Undergraduate Computer Science

I’m always happy to see a new computing education blog, and I’m particularly excited by posts that identify open (research, and otherwise) questions.

At SIGCSE 2019 this past February, we organized a birds of a feather session (a one-hour discussion group) on modernizing mathematics in computer science. We expected a modest number of attendees but were surprised and delighted to host a completely filled room of discrete mathematics, algorithms, and theory of computation educators—60 attendees in total—interested in evolving how we, as a discipline, situate mathematical foundations in our curriculum!

What was even more surprising to us was how the discussion evolved over the hour. Our original intention was to focus on how we might re-shape the foundational portions of the computer curriculum in light of how computing has evolved over the last decade:

The undergraduate computer science curriculum is ever-changing but has seen particular turmoil recently. Topics such as machine learning, data science, and concurrency and parallelism have grown in importance over the last few years. As the content of our curriculum changes, so too does the mathematical foundations on which it rests. Do our current theoretical courses adequately support these foundations or must we consider new pedagogy that is more relevant to our students’ needs? In this BoF, we will discuss what a modern mathematics curriculum for computer scientists should cover and how we should go about accomplishing this in our classrooms. (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3293748)

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At this point, we shifted our focus from trying to answer the original “concept” question to identifying the myriad of problems that educators wrestled with along these three dimensions. We outline the problems that people raised below:

From https://cs-foundations-ed.github.io/sigcse/2019/03/29/bof-report.html