CPACE: A Collaborative Process to Align Computing Education with Engineering Workforce Needs
Michigan State University (MSU), Lansing Community College (LCC) and
the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) have partnered to design
and implement a process to create a collaboratively-defined
undergraduate computing education within the engineering and technology
fields in alignment with the computational problem-solving abilities
needed to transform mid-Michigan's economy and workforce. To promote the
abilities of engineering graduates to perform problem solving with
computer tools that are needed to transform mid-Michigan's economy and
workforce, the project will
- Bring together faculty and administrators from the College of
Engineering at MSU, LCC, key leaders in the Mid-Michigan Innovation
Team (MMIT) who are spearheading Mid-Michigan's U.S. Department of
Labor Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development
(WIRED) initiative, and representatives of professional
organizations who have an interest in transforming undergraduate
computing education.
- Create and institute a highly collaborative process to engage
these participants in redesigning undergraduate computing
curriculum. This process will be replicable in other engineering
schools, in other STEM disciplines and in other WIRED communities
state/nationwide.
- Document, research and evaluate the efficacy of this approach to curriculum change and development.
- Prepare a CPATH Transformation (T) grant proposal to complete
and implement the redesign of computing education in the
engineering programs at Michigan StateUniversity, LansingCommunity
College, and other mid-Michigan schools to serve as a test bed
for national implementation.
Intellectual Merit
For engineering education to prepare graduates to flourish in a new
global economy, innovation and flexibility in curricular design based on
constituency input and quality improvement principles are necessary
(Lattuca, Terenzini, & Volkwein, 2006). However, curricular change
in higher education requires faculty buy-in through cognitive
institutionalization (Colbeck, 2002). Therefore, reform efforts must
emphasize engagement of higher education engineering and computer
science faculty in the process of regional economic change and
school-to-work education (Fear, Rosaen, Bawden, & Foster-Fishman,
2006). The project's Transformation Model is designed to address these
structural issues for institutionalizing reform.
Broader Impact
The process developed in this project will ensure that a wide variety
of stakeholders - business, community leaders and post secondary
educators - collaborate to identify workforce computational skills,
define how these skills can be integrated across a curriculum, and
develop revised curricula that integrates computational problem-solving
across engineering departmental courses. By documenting, evaluating, and
making the process explicit, it can serve as a model for national
efforts to revitalize undergraduate computing education in engineering,
and should be extensible to other computing education reform efforts.
CPACE Transformation Process
The CPACE Transformation Process is shown in the figure below.
The process begins by bringing together representatives from the various
Stakeholderswho come together to
Identify Specific Workforce Computational Skills.
- The next step is to Abstract Computational Problem-Solving Principles
from this list of discrete skills. These principles are then checked
among the various stakeholders to confirm that they capture the
important skills. Since the principles are intended to capture a wide
range of skills, they should be broader and more generalizable than
individual skills.
- Next, we Align Principles with Computer Science Concepts
to map the problem-solving requirements onto the underlying computer
science concepts that are the foundation of computer science curricula.
This alignment is checked against the desired skills.
- From here we Identify Opportunities for Curricular Integration
that fit between the computer science concepts and engineering
curricula in other departments. The abstract concepts begin to align
with disciplinary problem-solving that addresses the eventual workforce
needs.
- The final step in the cycle is to Implement Computational Problem-Solving Revisions
in both computer science and other engineering curricula. We envision
revising curricula across courses in multiple engineering departments to
incorporate computational problem-solving tools within the various
disciplinary contexts.
