Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics
Education: Why an Informatics Degree?
Dennis P. Groth and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason
What is an informatics degree, and why? These are questions that have been posed to us on innumerable occasions for almost a decade by students, parents, employers, and colleagues, and when asked to prepare a Communications Education column to answer that question, we jumped at the opportunity.
The term “informatics” has different definitions depending on where it is used. In Europe, for instance, computer science is referred to as informatics. In the U.S., however, informatics is linked with applied computing, or computing in the context of another domain. These are just labels, of course. In practice, we are educating for a broad continuum of computing disciplines, applications, and contexts encountered in society today.
