The Computing Research Association (CRA) recently announced the appointment of Andy van Dam to chair its new Education Committee, called CRA-E. This committee has been tasked with thinking broadly about the future of computing education, especially at the undergraduate level.
Established as part of an ongoing trend toward reexamining the image of computing and the nature of the 21st Century computing curriculum, the CRA-E seeks to understand how the broad computing community needs to move forward in order to develop principles and philosophy underlying the computing education of the future. “We need to rethink some of our fundamental assumptions about computing education approaches and content, and Professor van Dam is the right person to lead that effort,” said Daniel Reed, Microsoft’s Scalable and Multicore Computing Strategist and Chair of CRA.
Andy has been on Brown’s faculty for more than forty years and was one of the founders and first Chair of the Department of Computer Science. He co-authored more than ten textbooks, including Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, and has authored or co-authored over 100 papers. Andy is a fellow of the IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of awards for outstanding contributions to computing education from ACM, IEEE and SIGCSE, and a winner of the 2002 CRA Distinguished Service Award. He also served as the Chair of CRA from 1985 to 1987.
