Data-Centricity: Rethinking Introductory Computing to Support Data Science

On a growing number of campuses, data science programs offer introductory courses that include a non-trivial amount of programming. The content of such courses overlaps that of traditional computer science introductory courses, but neither course subsumes the other. This talk argues that a common introductory course that covers both data science and data structures supports students and provides curricular flexibility, while also bringing social impacts of computing into the early curriculum. We’ll discuss both the design and implementation of such a course, including the programming language features that support it and the educational research that informs it.