Mining Data on Computing Majors Knowledge Game

Computing as a discipline is still very young, and there is much confusion about distinguishing the majors within the discipline. In the early 2000's, paper surveys were administered to distinguish between five computing majors: Computer Science (CS), Information Technology (IT), Information Systems (IS), Computer Engineering (CE), and Software Engineering (SE). Since then, Data Science, Cybersecurity, and other new majors have joined the computing discipline. We explored participants' current knowledge of modern computing majors at our institution via a modern web-based word cloud matching game. Word clouds were created by scraping Oregon Institute of Technology course descriptions for computing majors: applied mathematics (Math), data science (Math), cybersecurity (Business Management), and Computer Systems Engineering Technology (CSET) majors including embedded systems engineering technology, software engineering technology, and computing engineering technology. We invited 97 incoming freshmen to participate; 26 did. Our results showed that computing majors within departments are more difficult for participants to distinguish than computing majors across departments. Majors within the CSET department were most varied in results with embedded systems technology being the most confusing to participants. The applied mathematics major in the mathematics department was the easiest for participants to distinguish. Limitations of our work include a small sample and computing disciplines specific to our institution. Our contributions include an automated way to generate major descriptions using existing resources (catalog entries), an updated approach to collecting data that may be more motivating for students, and an updated list of computing majors including the emerging majors Data Science and Cybersecurity.