Why we should no longer only repair, polish and iron current computer science educations

Abstract

Various shortcomings of the current computer science/engineering education are identified and analysed. They are seen as being to a large degree due to various currently prevailing misconceptions concerning aims, scope, methods, impacts, long-term rôle and history of the scientific base underlying computing and information processing in general. An attempt is reported to develop a new compelling view of the underlying science — Informatics 1 . This science is seen here not as an engineering science that should primarily serve technology but as a fundamental science (with similar scientific aims as physics) that also affords a new very fundamental and broad methodology (with similar impacts as mathematics has). A new view is presented on aims, maturity, and breadth of the current Informatics as fundamental science and on the history of Informatics. In addition, some developments indicating deeper relations between Informatics and physics are discussed as well as some implications for Informatics from views on science developed in mathematics. All that is then used to derive some general and also more specific conclusions concerning aims and methods of the computer science/engineering education, as well as of the education in Informatics within other educational programmes. 1 In order to emphasize that we have in mind a new view of informatics we shall use this term with a capital I.