CS2013-final-report

How are students assessed
eScience students are assessed using various methods: two or three member team-based project assignments (30%),
eight to ten lab exercises (20%), class participation including weekly quizzes (10% ), mid-term and final exams
(20% each). On average, students are expected to spend about two to three hours per week on assessed work plus
class attendance.
Course textbooks and materials
There is currently no textbook for this course. Course materials consist of PowerPoint presentations, online
YouTube videos, and links to other online resources. All course materials, assignments, communications, quizzes,
and exams are available on Moodle 7 , an open source Learning Management System (LMS) available to students 24
x 7. Netlogo is predominantly used as the modeling tool for this course due to its ease of use and extensive library of
relevant models.
Why do you teach the course this way
The initial offering of this course in the Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 semesters made use of dynamical systems and
data-driven simulation/modeling paradigms; the textbook we used ("Introduction to Computational Science:
Modeling and Simulation for the Sciences," by Shiflet, A. B. and Shiflet, G. W., Princeton University Press, 2006)
was heavily based on calculus and mathematical formalisms. The topics covered were: Rate of Change, Constrained
Growth, Unconstrained Growth and Decay, Drug Dosage, Modeling Falling and Skydiving, Competition, Spread of
SARS, Predator-Prey, Errors, Euler's Method, Runge-Kutta Method, Empirical Models, Simulations, Area Through
Monte Carlo Simulation, Random Walk, Spreading of Fire, and Movement of Ants. We used Mathematica 8 and
Vensim 9 for lab experiments. Teaching this course in this manner was instrumental in helping us understand what is
wrong with current approaches to teaching science, including ours. For example, the eScience course attracted a
diverse group of students the first time it was offered, including those majoring in communications, business,
computer science, and information systems. However, early on in the semester eight of the twenty students dropped
the class, citing the heavy use of calculus as the reason for doing so. We can only speculate that these students have
conveyed their experience to their academic advisors and fellow students, and the 75% drop in the course enrollment
the following semester seemed to indicate such a possibility. In conversations with students who stayed in the class,
we learned that they expected a class that was very different from the one that was offered. They were hoping for a
class that would demonstrate the utility of science in many areas of everyday life, including social interactions,
economy, stock market, diseases, weather, poverty, population growth, ecology, global warming, war, politics,
social unrests, and nature in general. They wanted to be able to experiment with various settings and what-if
scenarios in order to understand the consequences of their actions, sensitivity to initial conditions, and
interpretability of the outcomes. All in all, they wanted it to be fun, engaging, and relevant. At the same time, we
felt that both the class and the laboratory needed to be structured enough to include a broad range of well-defined
experiments, verified data inputs, predictable/repeatable outcomes, and open questions to be explored.
We changed the course format to its current incarnation in the Fall 2011 semester. The dependency on math and
calculus was eliminated and the list of topics was changed to include social sciences, humanities, and arts in addition
to the natural sciences. No textbook is required. For each topic, we designed or found existing presentation materials
and experiment/tool that addresses a recognized problem of significant interest relevant to today’s students. The
purpose of the current eScience course is to convince students that science is interesting, important, relevant to their
7 www.moodle.com
8 http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/
9 www.vensim.com
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