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Introducing computer science in an integrated science course

Published: 06 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes our implementation and experience of incorporating computer science concepts into a team-taught, first-year interdisciplinary course for prospective science majors at the University of Richmond. The course integrates essential concepts from each of five STEM disciplines: biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics. Including computer science in this course faces three primary challenges: few of the students have any CS background; the time devoted to CS instruction is reduced compared to a traditional introductory CS course; and the spirit of the course requires the CS material to be highly integrated with the other disciplines. Here we discuss our experience from three-plus years of offering the course and its impact on the major/minor pool of students in our own discipline.

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Cited By

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  • (2019)Integrating Scientific Programming in Communities of Practice for Students in the Life SciencesPractice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2019: Rise of the Machines (learning)10.1145/3332186.3333040(1-6)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2019
  • (2018)Power, pitfalls, and potential for integrating computational literacy into undergraduate ecology coursesEcology and Evolution10.1002/ece3.43638:16(7744-7751)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
  • (2017)Engaged IT Experience Course to Enable the Future WorkforceProceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3125659.3125694(7-12)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2017
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '13: Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2013
818 pages
ISBN:9781450318686
DOI:10.1145/2445196
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 06 March 2013

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  1. CS1
  2. integrated science

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SIGCSE '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 111 of 293 submissions, 38%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Integrating Scientific Programming in Communities of Practice for Students in the Life SciencesPractice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2019: Rise of the Machines (learning)10.1145/3332186.3333040(1-6)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2019
  • (2018)Power, pitfalls, and potential for integrating computational literacy into undergraduate ecology coursesEcology and Evolution10.1002/ece3.43638:16(7744-7751)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
  • (2017)Engaged IT Experience Course to Enable the Future WorkforceProceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3125659.3125694(7-12)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2017
  • (2017)A computing education approach for geography students in context of GIS2017 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EDUCON.2017.7943092(1790-1796)Online publication date: Apr-2017
  • (2015)Introducing Computing Concepts to Non-MajorsProceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2676723.2677308(132-137)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2015

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