Schools and colleges are failing the next generation of scientists by not
providing the computer skills they need to do the job, according to the
scientists behind
Microsoft
Research's 2020 report.
"Our findings show that computer science is set to become as fundamental to
the natural sciences as mathematics has become to the physical sciences," said
Stephen Emmott, a director at
Microsoft Research
Cambridge.
"This means that tomorrow's scientists will need to be highly computationally
literate as well as being highly scientifically literate.
"As a consequence we need to rethink how we educate today's children in order
to ensure that we have the new kinds of scientists that we need for tomorrow's
science."
The same idea was followed through by several other members of the scientific
panel.
"A scientist not interested in computing is an oxymoron," suggested Ehud
Shapiro, a professor at the
Weizmann Institute of
Science.
"A physicist cannot hire a mathematician to sit in the next office and help
him do things. To be a good physicist you must also be a good mathematician.
"We believe that tomorrow's biologist will not be able to be a poor computer
scientist. It will not work out to hire a computer scientist to sit next door
and do the computation for the research. He will not be able to be a good
biologist without being a good computer scientist."
Andrew Parker, director of the
Cambridge eScience
Centre, added: "I have a very simple message about scientific training from
the conclusions to the report.
"When I take on a PHD student they come to me trained very well in
mathematics and physics, and they're trained to solve problems that can be
expressed on two sides of A4, because that's what the examination system
presents them with.
"They might have used computers before or even an oscilloscope, but they will
have no training and no experience of data handling, data analysis or many of
the things we need to make a single meaningful plot of modern scientific data.
"So we need to completely change the way we train the next generation of
scientists in order to tackle the challenges.
"They don't need IT courses on how to read their email and do word
processing; they need computational science courses which are relevant to
analysing large data collections, searching, making hypotheses, doing
simulations.
"We need to build this sort of computer science training into school level
and right through university if we want to have scientists capable of taking
advantage of the experiments we'll be able to deliver in the next 15 years."
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