Peter Bowyer wrote:
Hi,
For those of you who remember my previous email, I have been given the go-ahead to do my masters project investigating and developing techniques to teach programming to second year physics undergraduates at the University of Southampton. [Snip]
I'm excited by this project, but starting to feel I've bitten off more than I can chew, so any advice or suggestions you can make would be great. Do any of you have existing course material for teaching programming to physicists (or engineers) or for teaching physics using programming which you can share?
I have been requested to provide some coverage of alternative teaching methods and techniques in my report. If anyone can point me to resources on this topic I'd be most grateful.
My first suggestion would be to go through the edu-sig archives. :-) Then, I would take a chance and order: Python Scripting for Computational Science Series: Texts in Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. 3 Langtangen, Hans P. The author has a collection of slides here: http://www.ifi.uio.no/in228/lecsplit/ If I may suggest one additional topic (which I didn't see after a quick scan, it would be to explore simple functional programming techniques, and "demonstrate" the fundamental theorem of calculus, as inspired by Kirby. (http://aroberge.blogspot.com/2005/04/computing-derivatives-using-python.html) I wish I had some teaching material to offer you; perhaps in a few years, when I leave the administrative side of academia. Good luck! André