The current Computer Science curriculum must be modified to
help students better understand how to apply their education
to real world problems. The primary objective of the Computer
Productivity Initiative (CPI) is to identify and develop these
modifications, portable to any CS program. A multi-year, coordinated
project is introduced into the curriculum. Students from several
courses coordinate and share information concerning the broad, ill-structured
project topic/problem. The courses involved in the CPI project are linked
through the tasking of one class by another. The tasking class is always one
of the senior CPI courses, while the tasked classes include a sophomore
and a junior level course.
The two new senior level courses focus on such topics as technical research,
market research, presentation skills, group collaboration, interviews,
budgeting, proposal writing, presentation tools, scheduling,
hardware availability research, system architectural design, requirements
specification, simulation, prototyping, and cost estimation.
Initial feedback from our students, potential
employers and an external board of advisors confirms both that the most
successful graduates may not be those with the best technical education
and that this effort can provide that additional dimension to the
traditional CS curriculum which better prepares students to contribute
to the solution of ill-structured but real problems. |
