Dr. Joseph Zachary

This approach ignores the fact that computation has evolved into an essential way of illuminating scientific and engineering principles. Researchers now choose among the theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches to studying scientific phenomena. We believe that it is as unreasonable to teach science and engineering without computing as it would be to do so without calculus and differential equations.

To encourage the integration of computation into the science and engineering curricula, we have designed and taught an introductory course in computing, called "Engineering Computing," expressly for science and engineering students. Our goal was to create a course to satisfy the standard programming requirement while preparing students to immediately exploit the broad power of modern computing in their science and engineering courses. Our course has at least four distinguishing features:

1. We use a symbolic algebra system (Maple) in combination with a conventional programming language (C).
2. We teach programming concepts in parallel with a scientific problem-solving methodology.
3. We draw on a variety of computational problems from the breadth of science and engineering to interest students and establish the relevance of the computational problem-solving approach.
4. We have developed an extensive suite of interactive, online laboratory materials that students can use via any HTML viewer, such as Netscape.