Again I find myself lost in detail. Such statements like "The course will teach the representation and manipulation of numeric and nonnumeric information" and "It will teach the utilization of various data structures including arrays, strings, and records (structures)" seem lost without being understood in a larger context.

And as I say this I am continuing the theme I started earlier, in my other responses, that I think it seems almost a misguided effort to define the insides of something (in this case computer science education) without defining it's place amongst the other fields of study.

What does it mean to study computer science? Why do we study computer science? What does one have to offer to themselves and the world by studying computer science? I feel that if the answers to these questions, and questions like these, will help to better motivate the structuring of how computer science is really taught.

Here is a personal example of what I mean, to better clarify my point. In high school I took AP European History. At the time I did not care about European History at all. I didn't do any of the readings and did enough work to get by. Why? Because it was useless to me. No one told me why I was studying European History (aside from the occasional "It's good to know") and because I had no use for it I really truly believed it was useless.

However, now I understand where something like European History might come into play. In that class I was given an a chance to look into the hearts and minds of countless Europeans and how they had lived and what world they had lived in. Such an opportunity to pear into the human soul would be priceless to me now. Now that I understand the context of which a course (or a field of study) belongs, I am free to have the fun of discovering the inner workings of that field.

All I knew when coming into the field of computer science was that I liked tooling around on a computer and that I could get credit for that. I knew you could program neat things for fun or that may be useful to someone. Now, having glimpsed more of the field, I know that there are many more things to computer science then just programming, but where do they all fit in?

This is where I feel left hanging. I feel as if I am in high school taking AP European History all over again. Sure I know that the world depends on computers to run, but is that at all a fulfilling answer? For me it is not. I would like to know more.