NSF’s CISE Directorate awarded the first two Distinguished Education Fellow grants today to Dr. Owen Astrachan and Dr. Peter Denning. The awards are part of the CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) program that CISE began last year.
New CISE Assistant Director Jeannette Wing said that CISE supports the revitalization of undergraduate education in computer science because the community needs to show that computing is about more than programming or a machine in order to attract the best minds to the field.
Astrachan, of Duke University, received his grant to explore case-based approaches to teaching computer science. Denning, of the Naval Postgraduate School, received his grant to focus on defining the principles of computer science and to distill the principles into modules that can be used in teaching.
Both awards are $250,000 grants over 2 years.