The four stages of Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle guided the design of our graduate CS&E course. For each stage, students engaged in targeted assignments and activities. Generally, students worked through the cycle on a weekly basis.
How should we teach computational science?
Contributed by Wolfgang Bangerth and Jill Zarestky, Colorado State University Fort Collins
CIG's mission was originally focused on creating software for the geodynamics community. Over the years, that focus has expanded to providing education to our community on not only how to use CIG-supported software but to include the spectrum of general computational science knowledge, from using the command line to software development and numerical methods.
A question of interest to many of the people who interact with CIG, is how to structure our students' education in Computational Science and Engineering (CS&E) courses, and what teaching methodologies might work best. Given that one of us teaches courses in this area, we started to look through the education literature. Unfortunately, in contrast to mathematics and many other STEM disciplines, essentially nothing exists on CS&E education. But CS&E presents its own challenges: courses are most frequently taught as Computational X courses (X=physics, chemistry, geosciences), needing to cover breadth rather than depth. Topics commonly found on syllabi might include ... [cont]