Welcome

Welcome to the Web site of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSC). Whether you are a member of the Consortium, a participant in one of the regional conferences, or a professor or student with an interest in the issues pertaining to college computing, our hope is that you will find these pages informative and useful. Information regarding the regional conferences sponsored by the consortium is of particular interest.


Election Results are In

Congratulations to the winners in the 2008 CCSC elections! The winners are:

Vice President:  Bob Neufeld

Regional Representatives:
  Eastern:  Liz Adams
  Central Plains:  Scott Sigman
  Midwest:  Deborah Hwang
  Southwestern:  Kim Kihlstrom

Regional represenatives serve three year terms. The Vice President serves in that role for two years, and then serves two years as the President of CCSC. Currently vice-president, Myles McNally moves into a two year term as president. All of these changes became effective August 1st.


National Partners

A special welcome to our newest National Partners - Epic Systems Corporation and Turing's Craft. They join Cengage Learning, Microsoft Corporation. Pearson Education, RidgeSoft, and John Wiley and Sons in helping support the acivities of the Consortium. (Read More)


The CCSC Newsletter

The September newsletter contains the President's Welcome, the Editor's message, brief descriptions of upcoming conferences, and other Consortium news.


New CCSC Region

The Consortium is excited that a new region is being established in the South West. The first conference was held April 18-19, 2008, hosted by California State University Northridge. The conference featured professional papers panels and tutorial presentations, a student programming contest, and a student poster session.

This brings Consortium sponsored conferences to ten per year and pretty well covers the geographic lower 48 states. We’re excited about the enthusiasm that is being generated in southern California over this new regional conference.


CCSC - CSTA Collaboration

Since the General Business Meeting in Houston last spring, the CCSC Board has moved aggressively forward in discussions with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) to identify areas of mutual support. The cooperation between our organizations is important to both groups. At the college level, we have a vested interest in restoring our pipeline of potential computing students. In the K-12 realm, teachers need the support of college faculty for training and support and to help influence perceptions of the field as a potential profession. (Read More)

 


From the President

Myles McNally
Alma College

Welcome to another academic year. If you are like me, you are scrambling to get ready to teach your fall slate of courses – I’m teaching Software Engineering for the first time in nearly twenty years! How things have changed. The waterfall model of development potentially harmful? Alternatives to testing for software validation? And let’s not even talk about design patterns, UML diagrams, and agile methods.

It is this rate of change that makes our discipline both challenging and exciting. What should we teach? How should we teach it? These are not easy questions, particularly for those of us at smaller institutions where we don’t have numbers of CS colleagues to talk to. This is one place that our Consortium can help. It has long been our role to hold a number of low-cost, generally pedagogical oriented conferences throughout the United States. I always have a great time at CCSC conferences, getting some new ideas at the sessions and networking with colleagues before and after them. I hope you will be able to attend at least one of these conferences this year. Please consider submitting a paper, proposing a workshop or tutorial, or contributing on some other way to the conference program. With our current roster of 10 regions we cover the country fairly well. (However no conference in Florida yet. Wouldn't that be a nice place for a late fall or early spring conference? Are you interested in helping organize a conference in one of the states CCSC has not yet reached? Let us know.)

Like any incoming President, I have my list of duties, responsibilities, and goals. But they really add up to just one thing: to help CCSC support you, our members, in your professional life. Please feel free to send me any suggestions you might have at mcnally@alma.edu. I know that this might sound trite, but I really hope that we can work together to make this the best organization we can.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not thank our outgoing President, Susan Dean, for all the hard work she has done for CCSC over the years. She was an excellent President from whom I learned a lot – did you know that this was her second tour of duty as President? – and her active presence in the CCSC leadership will be missed. Great job Susan!


Upcoming Conferences

Consider attending a 2007-2008 CCSC regional conference. See next year's locations on the Conferences page.


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