Informatics at school

The form and content of informatics education at university are influenced not only by the results of research and development and by practical demands, but also by the attitudes and habits beginners have acquired during their time at secondary schools.

The situation for informatics at schools in Germany is bad and unsatisfactory. Informatics in the proper sense is taught only to a few pupils at secondary level II (which also is connected to a shortage of well-trained teachers). This deficit is camouflaged by an "Informationstechnische Grundbildung" administered at secondary level I - rightfully it is not given the ambitious name "Informatics". But this also means that the name "Informatics" is suppressed at schools, with the consequence that a uniform profile for informatics is not achieved there and thus not given to the general public. The result is that public opinion is misled to the opinion that this new and mysterious discipline can be reduced to the use and operation of devices and the discussion of possible applications and their risks.

Informatics, however, is so important for our present and future civilization, that it should be a school subject like physics - which also is given only in basic form at school without mentioning this restriction explicitly.

The situation of informatics at school can be improved only slowly, because of the inflexibility of the constraints. At the TUM faculty for informatics - starting with the winter term 1995/96 - informatics is being offered for secondary school teachers as a third school subject. This means an important step toward the better qualification of secondary school teachers has been taken.

Education at the university

To educate informaticians for a professional life in the economy has priority. As to the number of positions available today, it has been set in recent years rather stably at around 30 000. In the not-too-near future the number of informaticians will be comparable to the number of electrical engineers, which is around 12 000. Since technical schools and universities at present have not nearly as many graduates with informatics as a major (each about 1500 per year), positions for informaticians are also taken by persons with informatics as a minor or by informaticians with a special orientation, like economies, and to a significant extent by physicists. This may change if the gap disappears. In the long term, these groups of professionals will find positions in their own disciplines and will neither compete with informaticians nor substitute for them. A sufficiently large number of education places with informatics as a major is still needed.

As to the demands from practitioners for what an informatics student should have studied, it is not easy to obtain simple, in particular contradiction-free informations. From the literature, from leading people in the economy, in particular in personnnel offices, from personal experiences during cooperation with commercial companies, and from knowledge about the professional careers of our students, a clear trend can be seen: informaticians with a future will have obtained broad education oriented around those fundamental concepts that have achieved great importance to the action and conduct of an engineer. At least the graduates from university are not particularly expected to know the most recent software and hardware products or to have spent a great deal of their studies with programming problems; they are rather expected to use engineering methods and techniques for the reliable construction of large user-oriented systems, to enter a new field with new problems quickly, and to keep track of the development of the field by independent further education. D. L. Parnas has suggested allowing students to gain concrete experience in cooperative projects of the institute with private companies, instead of leaving them alone in arbitrary jobs, frequently leading to a prolongation of their studies.

The social competence of the informatician gains importance in the daily professional round. To keep this in mind, the TUM informatics curriculum includes suitable subjects.

Friedrich L. Bauer
Wilfried Brauer
Eike Jessen
Manfred Broy