Over the last few years, a group of computer science educators have had on-going discussions at the annual SIGCSE symposium about the state of mathematics education in computer science through multiple birds of a feathers sessions (in 2014, 2016, and 2019), lunch meetings, and informal hallway chatter. This blog is a way for us all to continue those discussions throughout the year, raise awareness of these issues to the broader computing community, and help both students and instructors wrestle with the difficulties of these topics through insights, resources, and advice.

What potential problems have come up during these discussions so far?

  • With the rise of data science, and machine learning, and probabilistic and statistical approaches to the discipline, coursework in statistics and probability theory seem to be requirements for today’s graduates. However, with our foundations courses already overfilled with content, what do we reduce or drop in order to make room for these topics?
  • Prior research by Gregg-Jolly et al. demonstrates the problems of student retention in STEM during the second year, in particular due to an increase in rigor in courses found in the second year. Foundational courses such as discrete mathematics typically appear in a student’s second year and are a significant departure from the tone and content of the introductory courses in the curriculum. Such courses could lead to many of the effects that Gregg-Jolly et al. describe but within computer science.
  • Paradoxically, while virtually everyone agrees that mathematics and computer science are closely related, some students fail to understand the connection of mathematics to the real-world tasks that they will perform in their future professions. Specifically, mathematical activities such as understanding notation and rigorous proof don’t seem to have direct applications to programming. Educators also disagree with how deep these connections are and how much of these connections students ought to know.
  • How do we scale up our mathematics educations to accommodate the booming enrollments that the discipline currently faces? What novel approaches and tooling support can we create to help students better understand the mathematical concepts of our foundational courses?

And I say “potential” because the research literature on these problems in computer science education is still nascent. Sigurdson and Petersen’s recent survey of students’ perspectives on mathematics is one of the few studies we have that attempt to affirm these problems. There is still plenty of discussion and research to be done to understand the space of computing foundations education and how we can best teach in that space!

With that all said, our hope is that this is a community blog for members of the CSed community interested in foundations education. If you have topics that you’d like to discuss, a book project or tool that you’d like to share, a related paper that you’d like to publicize, or a perspective/opinion piece that you’d like to get feedback on, please let us know!