Abstract
A multi-year effort, led by the Union College computer science (CS) department, in collaboration with two dozen non-CS faculty, resulted in the infusion of a computational component in many non-CS courses and the development of a number of new intermediate-level CS courses. Many of these changes and additions have persisted well beyond the end of the official project period. In this chapter we explore the collaborative mechanisms and the kinds of course changes undertaken.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Electrical engineering, computer engineering, bioengineering, mechanical engineering.
- 2.
Believing that course names can help attract students, the course names are Taming Big Data, Robots Rule! Game Development, Can Computers Think? Creative Computing, and Programming for Engineers.
- 3.
This poses challenges as some “just in time” teaching is required to introduce concepts that students would typically see in the data structures course.
- 4.
The remaining two courses (Web Programming, The Computer Science of Computer Games) were developed by the department to build on interest expressed by both our own majors as well as some non-CS students.
- 5.
During this time we also worked with 4 colleagues from outside of Union (at Bard College, Denison College, and Mount Holyoke College). We also worked with 3 faculty members from Bard High School Early College (NY City). Those projects are not included in the discussion here because they were not part of an institution-wide effort.
- 6.
Much of this work was done with support from the National Science Foundation under the CPATH program, Grant No. IIS-0722203. More information about the infused courses is at https://muse.union.edu/cpath/.
- 7.
Investment/savings, liquidity preference/money supply, aggregate demand, aggregate supply.
- 8.
This was the introductory engineering course with students from all 4 engineering majors.
- 9.
Note that the course itself was a sophomore research seminar, not a course specifically for history majors.
References
Barr, V. (2016). Disciplinary thinking, computational doing: Promoting interdisciplinary computing while transforming computer science enrollments. ACM Inroads, 7(2), 48–57.
Barr, V., Burkett, A., & Webb, N. (2013). Introducing blake browser: William Blake and computational analysis. CUR Quarterly.
Dvorak, T. (2016). Teaching programming in econometrics. Sixth Annual American Economic Association Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education (CTREE).
Guzdial, M. (2003). A media computation course for non-majors. In D. Finkel (Ed.), Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE ’03) (pp. 104–108). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Parton, W. J., Hartman, M., Ojima, D. S., & Schimel, D. S. (1998). DAYCENT and its land surface submodel: Description and testing. Global and Planetary Change, 19, 35–48.
Acknowledgements
The National Science Foundation supported elements of this work under Grant No. IIS-0722203. Current and past members of the Union College CS department have contributed to development of curriculum, courses, and competency guidelines, and helped establish our relationships with faculty in other departments: Linda Almstead, Brendan Burns, Aaron Cass, Chris Fernandes, Dave Hannay, David Hemmendinger, John Rieffel, Kristina Striegnitz, Andrea Tartaro, and Nick Webb. Information on all faculty funded under this grant is available at https://muse.union.edu/cpath/, and I particularly acknowledge Eshragh Motahar (Economics), Jeff Corbin (Biology), and Andrew Burkett (English) for their ongoing enthusiasm for and commitment to interdisciplinary applications of computing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barr, V. (2017). Disciplinary Thinking, Computational Doing: Collaborating for Mutual Enrichment. In: Fee, S., Holland-Minkley, A., Lombardi, T. (eds) New Directions for Computing Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54226-3_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54226-3_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54225-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54226-3
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)