A small footprint curriculum for computing: (and why on earth anyone would want such a thing)

Computing -- not just programming, but the fundamental ideas behind computational thinking and computational systems -- is increasingly important to a broad set of disciplines ranging from computational biology to organizational behavior and from statistics to philosophy. At the same time, computer science curricula reflect the growth of the discipline and its maturing efforts to capture a broad range computational phenomena, leading to larger and more inwardly focused computational programs. This talk describes an alternative, the small footprint curriculum developed at Olin College, and the lessons learned in creating this curriculum about what is core to computing. While Olin's program was constrained by the need to incorporate hands-on problem solving, teamwork, and design within an engineering curriculum, the talk will also survey the many other educational trends that make such a small-footprint curriculum desirable.Lynn Andrea Stein is Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and the Director of the Computers and Cognition Laboratory at the newly established Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. Prior to becoming one of Olin's first faculty members, Stein spent a decade on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computer Science. Stein's research focuses on the role that interaction plays in both computational and cognitive processes; her projects include the construction of an artificial humanoid and an intelligent room, philosophical and pragmatic work from knowledge representation to the semantics of cognition, and most recently co-authorship of foundational documents for the semantic web.