Awakening Rip Van Winkle: Modernizing the Computer Science Web Curriculum

Paper for ITiCSE 2011 in Darmstadt, Germany

Paper Details

  • PUBLISHED:2011
  • JOURNAL:Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education

The world of web development has experienced a great deal of change over the past decade. The importance and complexity of web development is currently not adequately reflected in the ACM Computer Science 2008 Curriculum, nor in most reported computer science programs. This paper examines published literature on teaching the web since 2001 and argues that the computer science curriculum needs to be woken up and modernized in regards to the importance of web development. The paper critiques the approach of teaching web development topics within a single course. It articulates a wide variety of web development topics that need to be covered in any contemporary computer science program and which are often absent in other published accounts of this course. The paper concludes by arguing that a multi-course stream in web development can help the students integrate the discrete pieces of knowledge garnered during their undergraduate education.

Read Paper