New!

A set of course exemplars showcased at the SIGCSE-13 "CS2013 Exemplar-Fest" are now available here.

CS2013 Course and Curriculum Exemplars

The CS2013 Curriculum Steering Committee is seeking exemplars of courses and curricula from the broader community. This open process will better connect the CS2013 Body of Knowledge to real, existing approaches representing diverse and innovative ways to teach computer science. In computer-science terms, the topics and learning outcomes in the Body of Knowledge represent a specification, whereas a curriculum is an implementation and a course is part of a curriculum.

Including exemplars as part of the CS2013 effort is a new idea not present in previous versions of the ACM/IEEE-CS computer science curriculum guidelines. The steering committee believes they will provide greater value than stylized model courses that do not directly describe actual experience. Submitting an exemplar is your opportunity to present a successful approach to teaching computer science in a way that will prove useful to educators working to adopt the CS2013 guidelines.

To give a full sense of the diverse ways to teach the material in the Body of Knowledge, we anticipate will take at least several dozen course exemplars. We need at least a few "in" each Knowledge Area although we recognise (and specifically encourage) exemplars that cut across two or more areas. We anticipate receiving fewer exemplars describing full curricula. Separate sections below elaborate the distinction between course exemplars and curriculum exemplars. For both, templates and examples are available.

Contributing

At this time, we are seeking two kinds of contributions:
  1. A mapping showing how an individual course satisfies Knowledge Units in one or more Knowledge Areas.
  2. A mapping showing how an entire curriculum satisfies the requirements of the core curriculum.

Courses

For individual courses, we have created a text-based template (MSWord) to facilitate collecting the desired information. Specifically, the template asks for information that situates the course in your curriculum context and that provides detail on course content and pedagogic rationale. We believe that filling out the template should take about half an hour if you know the course well.

Curriculum

For a full curriculum, we have created a spreadsheet that allows you to indicate which of your courses contain topics that address the core curriculum learning outcomes. To the extent possible, we would appreciate having a completed individual course template for each course mentioned in the mapping. We recognize that this task will require non-trivial effort, but the resulting information will be invaluable to the Curriculum 2013 revision effort. We anticipate this task would be most easily accomplished by having a coordinator who solicits input from the faculty members responsible for teaching the associated courses. Please feel free to contact cs2013-exemplars@cs.stanford.edu with any questions about curricula mapping.

Other material

If you would like to provide a mapping for a unit within a single course, or for a small collection of related courses (for example, a two or three course sequence), you should use the individual course template and apply the questions to the course fragment or sequence.

If you would like to provide a mapping for a large collection of courses but not your entire curriculum, you should use the full curriculum spreadsheet, including only the courses in question.

Please map your exemplars against the Ironman Body of Knowledge (currently available here).

Submission Details

Please send exemplars submissions (completed template files) via email to cs2013-exemplars@cs.stanford.edu. Initially, exemplar submissions will be made accessible to the computing education community via the CS2013 discussion group on the computingportal.org web site.