Collaborative Teaching Across Freshman Information Technology and Chemistry Courses

College SCienCe TeaChing F aculty at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, often look for potential collaborations between departments to provide the cadets (students) with a broader sense of how topics interrelate in their courses. Because our curriculum is very structured, with 30 core courses in a 40to 43-course program, students are generally enrolled in the same courses as their peers, especially for the first two years (Kaufman 2004). This common course enrollment makes it possible to link courses and populate them with the same group of cadets. A link between the two-semester, freshman introductory chemistry course, General Chemistry (CH101/CH102), and the freshman information technology (IT) course, Introduction to Computing and Information Technology (IT105), was initiated to provide real-world IT assignments. There had been previous success linking the chemistry course to the freshman composition course (EN101) (Blackman, Gandolfo, and Kowalski 2005) through writing assignments on chemistry-related topics. We decided that collaboration between our disciplines provided a way to help students form connections between ostensibly unrelated concepts. IT105 consists of approxiCollaborative Teaching Across Freshman Information Technology and Chemistry Courses