Education Committee

ACM India Council has set up an Education Committee in line with the ACM Education Advisory Committee that operates at the global level. The ACM India Education Committee initiates activities that aim to influence government policies with respect to computing education within the country, both at the school and the college level. This is facilitated by liaising effectively with regulatory bodies such as the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), various State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Two well-known initiatives spearheaded by this committee are CSpathshala and the annual symposium COMPUTE.

CSpathshala promotes computational thinking as an essential skill to be taught at the school level. This initiative was launched in April 2016 with initial funding from Google. In just four years, it has been successfully deployed in several hundred schools across multiple states.

Since 2018, ACM India’s annual symposium COMPUTE has focused on computing education, bringing together faculty members and members of boards from various institutions to improve curricula, pedagogy and assessment in computing at the undergraduate level.

The committee also periodically sets up task forces for specific purposes, as needed. One such task force studied effective methods for teaching programming, with the goal of influencing introductory programming courses in undergraduate programmes.

ACM India is committed to positively impact pedagogy in universities and colleges. In that context, recently ACM India submitted a report about the introductory programming course which now appears on the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) website.

This report describes a design for an introductory programming course together with pedagogical and assessment strategies. These ideas have been used to develop an introductory programming course on NPTEL and also a course for teachers, also on NPTEL, explaining the design, pedagogy and assessment aspects. ACM India will be glad to assist universities desirous of implementing the ideas in the report.

In a similar vein, ACM India has started a new initiative called the Teaching Partnership Program (TPP) whereby experts from premier academic institutes and industry jointly teach a core or elective course with a local faculty of a university or a college.

Education Committee

Viraj Kumar, IISc Bangalore (Chair)
Chitra Babu, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai
Neelima Gupta, Delhi University
Pankaj Jalote, IIIT Delhi
Neha Karanjkar, IIT Goa
Uday Khedker, IIT Bombay
Venkatesh Raman, IMSc Chennai
R Ramanujam, IMSc Chennai
Vipul Shah, TCS
Kaarthik Sivakumar, Cisco
R. Venkatesh, TCS
R. Venkateswaran, Persistent Systems