From Awareness to Action - Page 5 of 20

To address the need for a more rigorous definition of the content area of ethics and social impact within computer science, the ImpactCS Project was funded in 1994 by the National Science Foundation [27]. It brought together 25 experts to define the core content and methodology for integrating social impact and ethics topics across the computer science curriculum. Over the past three years the project has issued reports that address the major problems hampering the implementation of across-the-board curricular change: the lack of a well-specified definition of core content and learning objectives, and the lack of models for adapting and adopting existing materials that address the core topics into the computer science curriculum.

In CC91, the basis for defining the curriculum is stated as the "platform of knowledge that is considered essential for all students who concentrate in the discipline." The first report of Project ImpactCS [15] provided a formal, theoretical framework as the foundation for a tenth subject area in computer science. The second report [19] instantiated this framework by articulating the essential core of knowledge in this new area with the same rigor and formalism used to define the other nine subject areas through knowledge units and learning objectives. In this report we will provide a rationale and several models for the progressive integration of material and educational experiences dealing with ethics and social responsibility across the CS curriculum [7, 21, 26].