Chemistry 462
Next fall I will be teaching a course I last taught years ago (I think in 2007). It was my first undergraduate course at UM and I received the lowest teaching evaluations of any course I have taught here (generally they are pretty good).Â
I have heard much grumbling about this course in the years since, and I am going to try something different this year: I am going to port the course to Matlab so that the students will learn a useful programming language. I will also try to teach them something about computer programming.
My plan is to keep many of the same programs and activities, update some, and also to teach some basics such as variables, flow control, functions and ideas of memory and how to address it. Fortunately Matlab makes scientific programming so easy that you can really do things that are helpful right from the word âGo!â Also, there is now an open source clone called Octave, so students can get started for no additional expense (besides having a computer!).Â
There is a book called âMatlab: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solvingâ by Stormy Attaway (what a name!). I will take a look at that book and figure out what parts of it I can use.Â
I had the good fortune to be required to take a computer science course as part of my undergraduate major at Brown University way back in 1992-1996. I would say that most students I meet today are no more proficient in programming that I was over 20 years ago, and many are much worse, which is insane. Could you imagine saying the same thing in 1992 (students with 1972-level computer skills)? No, you couldnât. At Brown, I had an awesome class (CS4), it was hard and we worked a lot, and I know I canât demand the same now, but at least I had a course in how to learn the thinking of programming and algorithms.













