  We live in exceptional times in which the entire world is witnessing the
exponential spread of a pandemic, which requires to adopt new habits of mind
and behaviors. In this paper, I introduce the term exponential competence,
which encompasses these cognitive and social skills, and describe a course for
computer science and software engineering students in which emphasis is placed
on exponential competence. I argue that exponential competence is especially
important for computer science and software engineering students, since many of
them will, most likely, be required to deal with exponential phenomena in their
future professional development.
