CS ...

Computer science education will probably focus less on coding and more on computational thinking and A.I. literacy, said Mary Lou Maher, a director of the Computing Research Association.
Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

CS, the gateway to $$ is no more unless one changes how one codes and thinks as AI's learning how to program in real time, something humans cannot do in any way, shape or fashion so ... a new approach to teaching CS is needed before it's too late.

Half Adder Circuit

To whit.

Carnegie Mellon University has a well-earned reputation as one of the nation’s top schools for computer science. Its graduates go on to work at big tech companies, start-ups and research labs worldwide.

Still, for all its past success, the department’s faculty is planning a retreat this summer to rethink what the school should be teaching to adapt to the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence.

The technology has “really shaken computer science education,” said Thomas Cortina, a professor and an associate dean for the university’s undergraduate programs.

Computer science, more than any other field of study, is being challenged by generative A.I.

The A.I. technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT, which can write essays and answer questions with humanlike fluency, is making inroads across academia. But A.I. is coming fastest and most forcefully to computer science, which emphasizes writing code, the language of computers.

“We think that’s where it’s going,” he said. “But do we need a more profound change in the curriculum?”

Currently, individual computer science professors choose whether to allow students to use A.I. Last year, Carnegie Mellon endorsed using A.I. for introductory courses. Initially, Dr. Cortina said, many of the students regarded A.I. as a “magic bullet” to quickly complete homework assignments, which involved writing programs.

“But they didn’t understand half of what the code was,” he said, leading many to realize the value of knowing how to write and debug code themselves. “The students are resetting.”

That’s true for many computer science students embracing the new A.I. tools, with some reservations. They say they use A.I for building initial prototype programs, for checking for errors in code and as a digital tutor to answer questions. But they are reluctant to rely on it too much, fearing it dulls their computing acumen.

“A computer science degree used to be a golden ticket to the promised land of jobs,” Mr. Drake, 22, said. “That’s no longer the case.”

“A computer science degree used to be a golden ticket to the promised land of jobs — that’s no longer the case,” said Connor Drake, a senior in the computer science degree program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Credit...Jesse Barber for The New York Times

Tech never sleeps ...

Church encoding of the natural numbers in lambda calculus