Many liberal arts colleges require their students to take  a Computer Science affiliated course to acquire “technological skills”. However, typically the students are directed to take an  introductory Computer Science course which may not designed to provide computing skills that would directly benefit students that aim to pursue a career in the physical sciences. We have designed a course called “Introduction to Scientific Computing” at Wagner College to provide students with hands-on training on typical work-flows in scientific data analysis and data visualization. This course has been taught at Wagner for the last 5 years in the Spring semester and geared toward second semester first-year students. Students are trained in the symbolic computing platform, Wolfram Mathematica® to apply functional programming to analyze data. The course presents examples from various scientific disciplines to instill computational thinking. The students are also trained to perform molecular visualization using open source software packages like, Avogadro and Visual Molecular Dynamics, to understand secondary and tertiary protein structures, construct molecular animations, and to analyze computer simulation data. The students perform a small research project as part of the course and these range from data mining to construction of custom web sites to display their final products. These experiences stimulate students to apply these skills across multiple courses and their research endeavors. The course has also been offered as an undergraduate research experience for students to apply their scientific computing skills to study climate change data and thus provides students with their first experience with large scale data analysis. Recently, the course was offered with a colleague in the Philosophy department as an interdisciplinary learning experience where students learn programming skills and analyzed the data about the gun violence problem in the United States. Student self-assessment data and results from the Course based Undergraduate Research Experience survey suggest that the course satisfies our outlined learning objectives. Informal and formal student feedback strongly supports our original hypothesis that providing research experiences early in a student’s undergraduate experience would lead to positive outcomes for our Departmental recruitment of majors, minors, and an overall improvement in the research activities and interests of our student body.

First-year course in scientific computing to cultivate student interest in research

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.