Events & News
Suzanne Westbrook and Saumya Debray receive $800,000 CPATH-2 grant
September 24, 2009
Computational concepts, techniques, and ideas have spread through many
"traditional" disciplines in recent decades, resulting in fields such as
Computational Biology and Computational Linguistics that explicitly
acknowledge their computational aspects. At the same time, however, most
students in such disciplines receive a relatively narrow education that
does not expose them to the wide range of computational concepts and
techniques pertinent to their fields of study. The University of Arizona
aims to address this situation via a campus-wide collaborative effort to
train students in all fields in information science and computational
thinking. This project develops, implements, and evaluates core
components of the undergraduate curriculum for the School of Information
Sciences, Technology, and Arts (SISTA) at the University of Arizona. The
vision of SISTA is to identify how ideas in computational thinking,
information sciences, and technology apply across a variety of
disciplines; to provide a broad foundation in information science and
computational thinking for students in many majors; and to foster
students' awareness of interdisciplinary relationships starting with
their first year at the university. Additionally, new relationships
between departments across campus will be formed by engaging faculty in
contributing to seminars on issues in computational thinking in their
disciplines and in bringing together and supporting multi-disciplinary
faculty teams to design, implement, and teach the new courses. The model
is intended to be transferable to other institutions. Results and
evaluations will be broadly disseminated.
NSF
Grant summary