I've started investigating science and engineering classes that are explicitly requiring programming.
- Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, and Purdue are now using a new introductory Physics text "Matter and Interactions" by Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood that uses Vpython for problem-solving and modelling. - A number of Biology courses around the US, influenced by the National Academy report "Bio2010," are now requiring programming (in at least Excel VBA). - David Auslander's mechanical engineering courses at Berkeley use programming to solve problems iteratively that don't lend themselves to closed form solutions. The teachers using these approaches complain that our traditional introductory courses don't prepare students for science learning. They care more about representation (e.g., how you represent a vector is critical for the kinds of algorithms that you write in physics), floating point limitations, and iterative methods, and less about type safety and object orientation. These teachers also complain that they don't want to teach programming, but find that they have to, to make up for what we didn't teach them in CS1. My guess is that, in these kinds of modern science and engineering classes, we should see significant cross-curriculum transfer, if we do it right. We did a follow-up study a year later of students who took our media computation class. These were all non-CS majors. About 20% of the respondents had written programs for themselves since the class had ended, without taking any additional CS classes. While not a cross-curricular transfer, I think that does count as transfer outside of the computer science classroom context. We published the result in SIGCSE 2005 -- draft version of the paper at http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-plan/uploads/37/designing-non-major -CS1-v6.pdf Mark -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Derek M Jones Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 11:23 AM To: Jens Bennedsen Cc: discuss@ppig.org; Michael E. Caspersen Subject: Re: SV: PPIG discuss: long term effect of introductory programming education Jens, > first of all - thank you for your quick answer. No, we are interested > in students in their second, third or fourth year at the university. > In many Danish (science) curricula, introductory programming is a > mandatory part - we are interested in two things: Has the students any > remembrance of the programming they learnt and how do they think of > the programming they learnt: was it relevant for their curriculum, > have it been useful (as a tool, as a way of understanding science, as > a way of understanding fellow students (computer science students in > particular)) All of the studies with which I am familiar find that education has zero cross topic effect on performance in other subjects. A somewhat surprising result. With regard to remembering what they have learned. Perhaps you would be interested in running this www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/accu06a.pdf experiment on your students. I plan to run it one some students in the near future and I am predicting that the performance will be close to 50% (ie, random selection) except for those operators commonly encountered in mathematics (except divide which is usually written vertically). -- Derek M. Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
