The development of a joint curriculum in computer science and engineering

A discussion is presented of the goals and recommendations of the Joint Task Force of the Computer Society of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery relative to the development of a curriculum in computer science and engineering. The objective of the project is to provide specific curricula guidance for programs offering an undergraduate major in the field of computing. The Task Force is convinced that all such undergraduate programs share a common core of subject matter that may be partitioned into the following subareas: (1) algorithms and data structures; (2) programming languages; (3) architecture; (4) numerical and symbolic computation; (5) operating systems; (6) software methodology and engineering; (7) databases and information retrieval; (8) artificial intelligence and robotics; and (9) human-computer communications. Each of these areas must be included in the background of any undergraduate major in a substantive way. The various parts of the course model are presented.<>