Quoting "Pete[r] Landwehr" <plandweh@cs.cmu.edu>:
Or is this whole idea dumb & everything is totally hunky-dory?
The idea isn't dumb, and things aren't even closely hunky-dory ! I recalled "an" earlier effort by the ACM to produce a standard "computer science" curriculum but could not recall when it was. So I did the sane thing and asked google about [acm recommendations for cs-1] ... I didn't find things similar to what I vaguely recalled but did come up with a nice summary of these efforts and some "start time" and "end time" data points ... ==== Martin Dickey, 2005. Model Curricula for Undergraduate Programs in Computer Science and Related Fields http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/dickey/curricula/ For a bit of the Bzyantine history of SW Engineering curricular efforts, see the CCSE Steering Committee's page and my notes from an old version of this web page. http://sites.computer.org/ccse/ ==== G. L. Engel, 1977, A Comparison of the ACMIC3S and the IEEE/CSE Model Curriculum Subcommittee Recommendations (PDF), http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/C-M.1977.217612 Matthew Hertz, 2010. What do "CS1" and "CS2" mean?: investigating differences in the early courses, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1734335 ==== I'd add two sources (1) Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, http://cpsr.org/ (2) Peter G. Neumann, The Risks Digest, http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks (3) Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind