SDP01_StudentGuide

Computation and Problem Solving STUDENT GUIDE

This course is probably different from all of the others you have taken. And that’s a good thing. This might be a frightening thought at first. But after you experience this course, we expect you will want more like it. And you will wonder why you haven’t had more courses like it in the past.

This is a “learning-by-doing” course, where the bulk of the activities in class are focused on doing project work, as opposed to passively sitting and listening to the professor lecture. You learned to read a long time ago so you don’t need your professor to read the book to you, which what most lectures really are.

We believe that you should be practicing the kinds of tasks that real professionals do, day in and day out. Most professionals spend very little time in lectures, doing homework that is thrown away after it has been turned in, or investing untold hours studying for exams. Rather, most professionals spend a great deal of time working with others to produce deliverables. To do your work well as a professional, you have to do preparatory work on your own, be prepared to work in a group setting, then finish, review, polish, and submit the work to your client.

The heart of this course is a collection of projects, all of which must be done during the semester. Some projects are due early in the semester, and some are due at the end. The amount of work required for each project is not small, and most will require more effort than you will be able to do on the night before it is due. This is precisely the way things work in the real world, and that is why we designed these projects this way.

To be successful, you need to skim over all of the provided documents and figure out what you must do, and when it must be submitted. This document lists all of the assignments and specifies what fraction of the course grade has been assigned to each. That list of assignments should be used as a checklist as you figure out what you need to do and when it needs to be finished.

Lastly, keep your eye on the course syllabus and double check to see if anything changes. We professionals know that nothing remains constant, and that the only constant in this world is change. Therefore, don’t wait for things to calm down. It won’t happen. It’s not good enough to learn to survive change. You need to learn how to master change and use it to your advantage. The process and methods of this course will help you do this, while the material we cover will help you come to understand Computational Science and how you might become a part of this dynamic and ever-changing field.