Computers Are Not Great

With all the respect to the computer science educational programs in worldwide universities and professionals, still computers are not great. Computers and software are integrating themselves massively in the fabric of life and are thought of as a mean to solve human problems from business, to daily life, to medical affairs. However, they are considered far away from the very fine problems felt by the very people. In this sense, computers become not great; this is until their existence reach to affect the troubled people.
Projects aimed at solving humanity and world problems are the big ones that are carried out by experienced scientists in research labs with huge budgets and finances. They are the ones that offer the complete full solutions to big problems and they are the long-term solutions to be felt by the people with problems. However, there are still the small and pressing problems that need short-term solutions or work around yet simple. They do not need experienced research scientists, big research labs, or budgets. They are the ones that shall complement big research projects carried out in big research labs. And here comes the role of young scientists and computer science students; this can be done by incorporating civic engagement projects to the computer science education in which young scientists get engaged with problems in their communities and attempt to solve them in term projects instead of being assigned meaningless and non-realistic projects.
Civic engagement is a missing element from the computer science curriculum which is a necessary element that puts computer science students, the future scientists and engineers, in direct sensitivity and contact with peoples' problems. Civic engagement incorporation in the computer science educational programs will be of four main benefits. Firstly, students will be able to observe real problems and look at them from technological and computing point of view. This will stimulate the ability to analyze problems and the skill of modeling a real world problem down to a computing solution. Such skill is not acquired through traditional and hypothetical assignments inside university walls. Secondly, civic engagement projects will enhance students' technical skills and creativity.
Actually, hypothetical assignments and projects are aimed at that purpose; however, they reluctantly fulfill it. They exploit the student's understandability of the concept, but they do not serve as a technical practice to that concept, as wrongly thought by most academicians; understanding the concept does not necessarily mean understanding how to use it in real context. This is a factor, the meaningless of assignments to students, that makes students themselves treat assignments as an academic requirement to be fulfilled for the sake of grades, but they personally do not believe in them. On the other hand, working on real world projects will enable students to go through the real process of developing something useful, something they personally got in touch with, and something that will model not only their understandability of technicalities but also the connection between such technicalities and the problem itself. This is a real process that encounters scientists and engineers.
Thirdly, civic engagement will bring up a new generation of scientists and competent engineers truly fit in today's market and the world's view of computers. Endeavors of solving and researching world problems are unintentionally monopolized by big research labs with their prominent scientists. This is because it requires proper expertise and funding. But what is about to happen when time requires current new generations to take over. For this reason, new generations of scientists and engineers have to be prepared to consume that role and be integrated in today's problems with the needed skills in an early stage. Fourthly, there is a great impact in terms of humanity when civic engagement becomes a core in computer science education. Mostly every problem encountered in today's world is sought to be solved by computing; if not successfully solved at least one of the first things thought of is can computers solve it. Big research projects done by respectable scientists and research labs are acting on the high end. They follow deep research studies, research methodologies, and proper equipments and budgets. However, we can get young scientists to complement those great efforts from the lower end; big scientists provide the full elegant treatment while young scientists attempt to offer short-term solutions.
This is the same analogy of offering a painkiller to a patient while prescribing him a treatment medication to help him endure the pain until the medication take effect. The inclusion of civic engagement projects can be perfectly suited for the educational purposes. This is the matter of how to include civic engagement formally or informally into the academic program of computer science. Generally, including civic engagement projects will greatly enhance students' understandability of the technical side which is the essence of education basically. Thus, even if a certain problem cannot be solved by students, knowing that it cannot be solved by computing due to complexity, time constraints, or the problem itself is not computable is of great benefit to education.
It is because students will be exposed to the very technical details learned since they will know that with the technical capabilities the problem is not computable or they will be able to know the technical burden of the issue which cannot be done for semester time constraints; this is a good experience to them. In this case, students will document their technical analysis to the problem and why it cannot be solved with technical illustrations. Although this appears that they did not technically implement a solution, it is very useful for their technical experience and understanding. Furthermore, civic engagement projects can be tailored to the nature of a computer science course.
Whether it is a theoretical course such as software engineering or a practical course such as C++ programming, professors can tailor the civic engagement project they offer to their students. This can simply be done by emphasizing the aspect of the problem relevant to the course needs; that is, taking the problem from the course prospective. For example, the computer science course of algorithm analysis and design that basically deals with algorithms time complexities and design.
In this case, students can work on projects in which the system response time is of a high order of magnitude. Students at the software engineering course shall study the real time problem and formulate the system's requirements and how they will design a system to solve the problem; and so on. Therefore, we basically see that civic engagement inclusion in the educational program is very useful in both cases whether students at a certain course will be able to implement a solution for the problem or they will even study the technicalities and reach the conclusion that no solution can be made.
Ahmed El-DeebResearch ScientistDimension Research Lab for Pervasive Computing
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