Computational curriculum for MatSE undergraduates and the influence on senior classes

X. Zhang, A. Schleife, A. Ferguson, P. Bellon, T. Bretl, G. L. Herman, J. A. Krogstad, R. Maass, C. Leal, D. R. Trinkle, and M. West

in Proceedings of the 125th American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition (ASEE 2018), Paper ID #22025, 2018.

Computational materials modeling has been emerging as a very important aspect in materials science research. At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, our faculty team at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, as part of the Strategic Instructional Initiatives Program (SIIP) of the university, have integrated comprehensive computational modules into multiple MatSE undergraduate courses and have created a collaborative teaching environment to improve these modules iteratively. Each year, a dedicated teaching assistant has been involved to communicate between faculty members, to ensure the quality of the computational modules, and to offer additional office hours. After three years of effort, we have now established a stable and systematic environment for computational education in MatSE undergraduate courses. The students initially involved in the program are now approaching their senior years. Thus we now investigate the influence of the computational experience in the SIIP classes on the performance of the students in the senior classes. In this paper, we present the recent progress of our computational curriculum and we focus on the influence of the program on the performance of students in senior computational modelling classes and senior classes with computational modules.

External link: https://peer.asee.org/30213

Full text: ZhScFeBeBrHeKrMaLeTrWe2018.pdf