All undergraduates are required to take CIS 101 in order to graduate.
“At Pace University, and in careers beyond Pace, students will face the challenges of coping with technology and the opportunities to benefit from the productive use of technology,” the course description reads.
The course educates students on how to use office software like Microsoft Excel, how to create and design a website using HTML, and the fundamentals of computer programming. This last item reflects a growing trend in higher education. There is now a push for non-computer science majors to learn computer programming skills. Many computer information experts believe that the category of ‘computational thinking’ should be regarded in the same way as essential analytical skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.
“Nowadays, computing is so much more important,” said adjunct professor of information technology, Anastasia Burke. “It just changes the level of thinking that a person uses. I think it helps a person grow on a different level, this is my personal opinion, if you’re forced to think logically. And really, that’s what software design is all about. I mean, just thinking about all the different scenarios that could happen and how to plan out for that. As you talk about the development classes, it is all about planning prior to sitting down and programming and that is one of the important things…I just feel like it’s important for business but also for your level of thinking as somebody who has higher level education. People are expecting that.”
However, according to Randall Stross of the New York Times, “There is little agreement within the field, however, about what exactly are the core elements of computational thinking. Nor is there agreement about how much programming students must do, if any, in order to understand it.”
“I am pretty comfortable with the level that we touched on it at Pace because it’s not a very high level,” said Burke. “We didn’t really go into depth that much. But I do feel that it was enough that people understand or start thinking about the different things going in all applications and programs that they’re using…like the fact that we worked with Alice and we were creating all the separate little methods and understanding that a program is broken into smaller parts. It helps people really start thinking about all of these different applications that they might be using. Something that we use every day like Microsoft Office. Well, maybe you will start thinking about the fact that–‘oh yeah!’ it makes sense that maybe spellcheck is a separate method or a separate module that is probably shared amongst all of the Microsoft Office processes.”
Students in CIS 101 learn how to use the object oriented programming system Alice 2.0., which demonstrates the nature of programming without going into semantics.
“‘Literacy’ implies reading and writing, so ‘computer literacy’ suggests that writing programs is a required skill for activity under this name,” Prof. Henry M. Walker of Grinnell University told the New York Times. “However, general citizens may or may not have to write programs to function effectively in this technological age.”
The question of how much students will need to learn as technology progresses remains.
“I grew up with computing being more like a mainframe system that most people never even come across anymore, and you did need to know more programming back then,” said Burke. “You did need to really sit down and write code. You had to basically go in and check it for bugs and make sure that you figured out what was wrong. You needed to know more at that level. We’ve made it easier to program now with object-oriented programming like we use [at Pace]…Do I think that in the future it is going to be that we need it less or more? I think it really depends on where things go. I don’t see it being much less…I think it is just going to be different.”