States of Emergency are declared for several reasons. One such reason popped into my head this morning.

It was our 2nd practical session this semester. 1st year students of Computer Science walked into the computer laboratory, and listened to an hour of lecture on a very wonderful topic: “Introduction to Microsoft Word 2010”. When 1st year Computer Science students of a Nigerian university are being taught “Introduction to Microsoft Word 2010” during practical sessions, then it’s time to declare a national educational state of emergency.

1st year Computer Students at Brock University (a public university in Canada) are taught:

1) APCO 1P00: Programming by example, encoding and manipulating pictures (such as grayscale and colour replacement), pixel manipulation (such as red eye and mirroring), designing and debugging, text manipulation with HTML , file processing, automatic generation and manipulation of web pages, and sound processing (such as encoding, volume manipulation and splicing).

2) APCO 1P01: Skills, concepts and capabilities of computers, networks and the Internet. Topics include representation of information, current hardware, software and network technologies, modelling with Excel, presentations with PowerPoint, Internet searching and basic web page development with HTML .

3) APCO 1P50: Issues in use of information technology including historic and social perspectives; legal, ethical and moral issues; intellectual property, licensing and copyright; privacy and freedom of expression; professional conduct and information literacy.

4) APCO 1P93: Modern software techniques including problem solving and design of effective algorithms, structured program design methodology, subprogram library usage, documentation, correctness, floating-point arithmetic and error analysis.

5) COSC 1P02: Foundations of Computer Science and computer programming in a high-level language (normally Java). Topics include computer fundamentals, representation of information, problem solving and software development, programming language syntax and semantics, methods, input/output, control structures and data types.

6) COSC 1P03: Programming and problem solving in a high-level programming language (normally Java). Data structures including arrays and linked-lists. Modularity, abstraction and abstract data types including stacks, queues and lists. Introduction to searching and sorting, recursion, algorithm analysis and object-orientation.

7) COSC 1P50: Issues in use of information technology including historic and social perspectives; legal, ethical and moral issues; intellectual property, licensing and copyright; privacy and freedom of expression; professional conduct and information literacy.

8) MATH 1P67: Development and analysis of algorithms, complexity of algorithms, recursion solving recurrence relations and relations and functions.

http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/offerings/first

Here’s what we’re taught at The Federal University of Technology, Akure (1st year Computer Science):

1) BIO 101: Introduction to Biology

2) CHE 101: Introduction to Chemistry

3) GNS 103: Information Retrieval (Introduction to the University’s Library)

4) PHY 101: General Physics

5) PHY 107: General Physics Laboratory

6) MEE 101: Engineering Drawing

7) GNS 101: Use of English

8) MTS 101: Introductry Mathematics

9) CSC 101: Introduction to Computer Science

http://csc.futa.edu.ng/courselist.php

Well, if we’re not going to declare an Educational State of Emergency, at least let’s give our 54 year old mother a well deserved tribute!