CS382:Class Notes

These are class notes for CS328: Discrete Modeling Development. They will be maintained by Kay and Charlie, but feel free to add parts we may have missed.

Wednesday, January 14

About the class:

• We will be designing a new class “in silico”
• new class will be offered the first time next spring
• geared towards first year students
• lots of this already developed, we’ll be selecting the best parts of which ones for this specific course at this specific college

Themes we're designing for:

• quantitative reasoning
• model development and use
• validation and verification
  • Did I solve the right problem? Did I solve the problem correctly?
• estimation
• visualization
  • data -> information -> knowledge
  • harder to do as go further to the right
  • visualization is one way to make it easier to get more from just data
• mostly the natural sciences, possibly some art
• using tools (spreadsheets, models, make your own or pre-made)

Methods we will use:

• inquiry based learning – find out how to solve a problem and document it, and describe what learned from it
• scaffolded – provide an empty framework for students to work through it in multiple ways
• metric system exclusively
• auto-magic grading?
  • Good feedback is important, possibly part of this could come from a machine

Units/modules (each probably week to two weeks) might include:

• reading
• lectures/discussion notes
• lab

Potential Units/Modules:

• "Seeing Around Corners" – an article about race behavior using Agent-based models
  • Lunch rooms, neighborhoods, etc.
• Possibly a unit with “sensor nets”
• Possible energy unit – EEAP, wind, solar
• Measuring – area, volume, count
• Ground water – wet lab, analytical, in silico
• Genomics
• Measure gravity (as between the roof of Dennis Hall and the ground)
• Something requiring lots of computational horsepower (maybe?)
  • Maybe just mentioning and not an entire unit
  • Maybe tied into the genomics unit or chemistry
• Chemistry, possibly forensic

Other Thoughts:

• We may find things that are really cool but that don’t fit into this particular class we’re designing. However, they may be inserted into various places in the CS curriculum – in POCO, ACS. We should capture them somewhere and Charlie will come back to them another time.