Computational Science and Engineering for New Undergraduates

To engineering and science students of the 21st century, computing is an area of fundamental importance. At Cornell, a traditional introductory programming course taken by first-year engineering students was transformed into a foundational course in computational science and engineering. This course teaches MATLAB programming and helps students develop an appreciation for fuzziness, error, approximation, randomness, and dimension. Computational concepts such as model, parameter, and sensitivity are examined, emphasizing that the goal of computing is insight to a problem, not just one answer. This session presents course materials developed to uplift the profile of computational science and engineering while faithfully teaching the traditional programming curriculum. Specific examples discussed include exercises in image processing, models for water quality simulation, and a MATLAB based robot simulator.