Section 10.3 Separable changes
¶Subsection 10.3.1 Develop Junior Lab
Proposal:
Begin development of a junior lab course. We propose an advanced lab course be developed for the spring of the junior year, so that Electronics, Computer Interfacing, and the new course will be a full-year sequence that students may take. We imagine this course being offered starting in Spring 2018.
Con: Developing a lab is a lot of work
Pro: Most of us would like more lab experience for students.
Pro: Most students (surprisingly!) expressed a strong appreciation for the Modern Physics lab report experience, especially in developing strong writing skills.
Pro: Perhaps this could become the Writing Intensive Curriculum course instead of Thesis?
Subsection 10.3.2 Intro to Computational Physics + Computational Physics Lab \(\rightarrow\) Computational Physics Lab
Proposal:
Eliminate 265 as a course. Ideally, we would integrate computation with the 21x sequence in one way or another, but this would not be a requirement of the major, so transfer students would go straight into 365.
We would retain the existing 365 sequence, which is a set of one-credit computational lab courses that parallel the Paradigms. These courses cover the same physics as the Paradigms, and are designed to reinforce student learning in Paradigms content.
The first term of this sequence will be required of all physics majors.
Con: Requires 365 to cope with students with no programming experience.
Con: Delays student computational experience until junior year, unless we are able to introduce computation into 21x.
Pro: Enables transfer students to take 365 with the paradigms.
Pro: Removes 3 credits of student work, which could be used to require more advanced computational courses, e.g. 365.
Pro: The 365 course structure is better geared towards students with no programming experience than the existing 265, since students do their work in class, working in pairs, with support.
Pro: (Some) Students see visual python as a crutch that is unhelpful for learning “real” programming and computation.