A Project-Oriented Organization for an Introductory Computational Science Course

Dealing with students of diverse majors, mathematical background and programming experience presents a challenge to interdisciplinary courses such as “Introduction to Computational Science.” The author’s solution to this problem was to base the course on a sequence of interesting and illustrative problems/projects. This approach allows the physical models, mathematical models, numerical techniques, parallelization techniques and visualization techniques appropriate to the problem to be presented, discussed, implemented, and digested in context. The project orientation provides a welcome focus for the background mathematics, numerical techniques and programming details. The course was offered in the Fall 2005 semester. The project-oriented strategy was successful for the expected reasons and the course was able to excite students with a wide range of backgrounds. They were able to complete the projects and understand the modules without being overwhelmed by whatever portion of the mathematics or programming in which they were less prepared than their peers.