An Integrated First-Year Curriculum for Computer Science and Computer Engineering

The University of Alabama is an active participant in the NSF-sponsored Foundation Coalition, a partnership of seven institutions who are actively involved in fundamental reform of undergraduate engineering education. As part of this effort, the University of Alabama has developed an integrated first-year curriculum for engineering students. This curriculum consists primarily of an integrated block of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering design. The engineering design course is used as the anchor that ties the other disciplines together. While this curriculum is highly appropriate (and successful) for most engineering majors, it does not meet the needs of a computer engineering (or computer science) major nearly as well. Recognizing this, the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering recently received funding under NSF’s Course and Curriculum Development Program to generate an integrated introduction to the discipline of computing. The revised curriculum provides a five-hour block of instruction (each semester) in computer hardware, software development, and discrete mathematics. At the end of this three-semester sequence, students will have completed the equivalent of CS I and CS II, a digital logic course, an introductory sequence in computer organization and assembly language, and a discrete mathematics course. The revised curriculum presents these same materials in an integrated block of instruction. As one simple example, the instruction of basic data types in the software course (encountered early in the freshman year) is accompanied by machine representation of numbers (signed binary, one and two’s complement) in the hardware course, and by arithmetic in different bases in the discrete mathematics course. It also integrates cleanly with the Foundation Coalition’s freshman year, and provides a block of instruction that focuses directly upon the discipline of