Should CS Educators Know ?

here is a difference between the background required of a practitioner or researcher in a scientific field and an educator thereof. While the work of the former requires extensive knowledge and skills in the field itself, the latter must have the additional ability to convey this knowledge to others correctly and reliably, to teach the said skills, to provide perspective, and to infuse the students with interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm. All this requires the educator to be more of a scientific intellectual, at least as far as the field in question is concerned. We claim that while some of this is a matter of personality and natural aptitude, some can be acquired by being exposed to material that goes beyond the technical core parts of the field. We take a closer look at these issues as they arise in the CS field. In particular, we identify some of the additional material with which CS educators should become acquainted, over and above that normally covered by an undergraduate CS program. As an interesting upshot of our work, we have constructed an undergraduate course out of this material, and have already had some experience delivering it. Parenthetically, it would be interesting to do the same for other subjects, resulting in Judith Gal-Ezer and David Harel