Before You Write Code ... Putting Data and Ethics at the Center of Introductory Computing

Computing is a large and growing presence in society in 2020, and like many others, we see a strong demand from non-computing majors for "CS For All" courses. Unlike many others, we do not feel that putting traditional programming first is the best way to do this. Instead, we are rethinking the way we introduce computing to allow a broad audience to engage with this discipline. Any computational problem we might tackle requires that we explicitly think about the data involved to solve the problem. Likewise, many computational problems potentially have deep implications for the effect of emerging technologies on society including complex racial and social justice issues. When training novice computer scientists, too often the focus is on learning to write code, but not on explicitly learning computational thinking (data-first, declarative) and how to spot, analyze, and mitigate the ethical implications of potential computing solutions. When teaching those from other disciplines about computer science, the importance of learning to write code is diminished still further, relative to skills in computational thinking and in reasoning about ethical issues in computing and emerging technologies.