Overview of the Discipline of Computer Science - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 27

What do these reports tell us about the connections between the nature of
computer science and its teaching?

Another (or additional) task can ask the students to add/change the definition for
computer science presented in Wikipedia (and, if relevant, the definition of other
computer science concepts).

Activity 2: Computer Science and Other Sciences
This activity is related to the comment stated above with respect to intercon-
nections of computer science with other disciplines, such as biology, econom-
ics, medicine, and entertainment.
• Stage A: Connections between computer science and other sciences, indi-
vidual/team work
The students are asked to identify a science which is interconnected some-
how to computer science and to define the connection between the two
sciences. This work can be based on Internet resources and journals.
One recommended resource for this task is the Microsoft Corporation's
report Towards 2020Science , published in 2006 (Microsoft Research
2006 ). 3 According to that Web site, the report “sets out the challenges and
opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the
sciences.”
• Stage B: Presentations
The students present, in front of the class, the science they focused on as
well as its interrelationships to computer science. It is recommended to
upload the students' products to the course Web site.
• Stage C: Class discussion

The discussion that follows these presentations has the potential to deepen
students' understanding with respect to what computer science is on the
one hand, and on the other hand, to highlight how computer science is used
by and connected to other sciences.

For illustration, we examine the case of computer science—biology interrela-
tion. According to the Towards 2020Science report (2006), “computer science
is poised to become as fundamental to biology as mathematics has become
to physics.” (p. 8) Specifically, “one of the first glimpses of the potential
of computer science concepts and tools, augmented with computing, has
already been demonstrated in the Human Genome Project, and by the success
of structural biology to routinely decipher the three-dimensional structure of
proteins. In this and in related sequencing projects, scientists use comput-
ers and computerized DNA sequence databases to share, compare, criticize,
and correct scientific knowledge, thus converging on a consensus sequence
quickly and efficiently.” (p. 24). Further, the report states that “there is a

3 The report is available online at http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/background_