Slashdot Mirror
Programming As a Part of a Science Education?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm a fairly new physics professor at a well-ranked undergraduate university. When I arrived, I was surprised to discover there were no computer programming requirements for our majors. This has led to a series of fairly animated faculty curriculum conversations, driven by the question: to what extent should computer programming be a part of an undergraduate science education (in particular, physics)? This is a surprising line of questioning to me because in my career (dominated by research), I've never seriously even questioned the need. If you are a physics major, you learn to program. The exact language isn't so important as is flow control, file handling, basic methods/technique, basic resource management, and troubleshooting. The methods learned in any language can then be ported over to just about any numerical or scientific computational problem.
Read on for the rest of the reader's questions and his experiences dealing with faculty who have their own ideas.
The reader continues, "I'm discovering the faculty are somewhat divided on the topic. There is even a bizarre camp that actually acknowledges the need for computer programming, but turns my 'any language' argument on its head to advocate the students do 'scientific programming' using Excel because it is 'easy,' ubiquitous, and students are familiar with it. They argue Excel is 'surprisingly powerful' with flow control and allows you to focus on the science rather than syntax. I must admit that when I hear such arguments I cannot have a rational discussion and my blood nearly boils. In principle, as a spreadsheet with simple flow control in combination with visual basic capabilities, Excel can do many things at the cartoon level we care about scientifically. But I'm not interested in giving students toys rather than tools. As a scientist raised on a heavy diet of open source software and computational physics, I'll hang my head in shame if our majors start proudly putting Excel down on their resumes. However, in the scientific spirit, perhaps I'm missing something. So I ask Slashdot, to what extent do you feel computer programming should be a part of an undergraduate science education? As a follow-up, if computing is important, what languages and software would best serve the student? If there are physics majors out there, what computing/programming requirements does your department have? My university is in the US, but how is this handled in other parts of the world?"
The introductory physics classes at Carnegie Mellon use VPython to run some simulations. It's pretty simple to use and intuitive. The textbook makes use of it too.
Physics requires number crunching. It's that simple. It's not much use learning differential equations if you're incapable of solving anything useful. Any physics or engineering major should learn at least basic numerical methods and how to implement them. For me, we did it with C, nothing fancy. As far as using Excel for scientific computing, some of my classmates tried to pull this in a heat transfer class. It's a joke, it'll work for something really simple, but it's no good for any serious work.
Back in undergrad, I helped my AtmoSci Masters' roommate out with several projects. At least in his case, the problems involved a lot of comma or space separated text files and mostly just limited data manipulation. Students had all been taught FORTRAN, weakly, and most classmates were trying to do it in FORTRAN. Several times, we created 20 line not-terribly-obfuscated Perl programs that worked much better than pages of FORTRAN for the task at hand.
Probably Python would be the 'cooler' kit these days. But, my former roommate, now with the National Weather Service, says it's all command-line Perl scripts there and working with me to learn Perl was one of the best things he got in college.
...one might expect, given the ubiquity of computers, that everyone (not just science majors) have some basic understanding of programming, even if it's just -- err --- BASIC.
I'll go even further and suggest that this isn't appropriate for college, but would fit nicely into 6th and 7th grade algebra.
What good reason is there that would make Matlab insufficient for a physics major? What amount of programming does a physicist do on a given day at the job?
If a physics major wants to learn more about programming than is required to compute complex formulas in Matlab then they should probably minor or double major in Comp Sci.
I majored in Math and the only programming I did as part of my degree was in Matlab. And that was in applied classes. I was taught just enough Matlab to do the assignments.
C/Java courses would have been a waste of time. A physics major's time is best spent learning how to use existing tools rather than wasting time learning low level languages so they can reinvent Matlab functionality.
Work Safe Porn
That was my formal introduction to computing. Later on in my course, I mostly used MatLab, and occasionally C. Sometimes I had to reverse-engineer old Fortran code. I wrote my Master's thesis in MatLab (even though it was a rather computationally expensive application. In scientific applications, the time saved during design time often easily makes up for the loss in computational efficiency).
Since I started my PhD, I've tried a lot of different languages, from MatLab to Java, C# Python and, recently, F#. Even though I was brought up with OSS (my laptop runs Debian next to Windows), I have come to value the rapid development capabilities of
I think my point is: It's probably a good idea to start with powerful low-level languages like C first, but don't overdo it. It's good if your students know about the existence of Assembler and Fortran, but the important point is that they lose their fear of computers. Nowadays, teenagers grow up with computers, but they never get to see behind the web 2.0 surface. Our generation grew up with text editors and batch files. They grow up with facebook. So it's important to give them a look behind the curtains. Let them feel the power of being able to control memory adresses. Once they have lost their fear of pointers, they can move on to use high-level languages that safe loads of design time, while being able to descend down into the architecture when it really counts.
I know this is going to confirm every bad stereotype the
Maybe next semester I'll do a research colloquium on SQL and basic database construction.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Back in 1974-78, all students in the University of Illinois' College of Engineering were required to take at least a semester of introductory programming. That included the Physics majors because the Physics department was under the aegis of the College of Engineering (unlike Chemistry, Biology, etc.). That this particular science was placed in the engineering school always seemed like a really weird, but good placement.
That is all.
There are whole classes of problems that Excel is well suited to solve. Linear propagation models, optical ray tracing for instance, is one. I remember back in the early 80's spreadsheets in general were touted as a good way to solve complicated 2-D boundary value problems via iteration because you are given a nice cell grid to start (I have foggy memories of doing this myself on whatever preceded Excel). I have seen some very impressive models built out of spreadsheets; it wouldn't have been my tool of choice, but the people putting them together could really do some impressive things.
At the undergraduate level I don't know what to say. I don't know how much programming I would force on the physics major. I am a very strong advocate of teaching mathematical methods for the major, as I had been. My professor spent some time having us learn FORTRAN, but I wouldn't say it was very productive because we were learning it for the sake of knowing it, not because we had a task to use it for (and so it really didn't set in). I didn't do any serious programming until graduate school, where I ended up becoming a FORTRAN expert after all.
I do agree that Excel can't handle real data sets, especially with the limitations of plotting 32k data points and only holding 64k in a column. On the other hand, not too much data handling you do at the undergraduate level deals with that much data.
I wouldn't say the students would be at a major handicap having only used Excel at the undergraduate level. If they are handed that particle data set in C++ objects, they'd do what I would have to do: learn C++. Between undergraduate and graduate school I made a conscience decision to learn either C or FORTRAN, since those were the languages of physics. I settled on C, picked up some books and started teaching myself. When I got to graduate school, the research I inherited was all FORTRAN, so I ended up betting on the wrong horse (at first, at least). When I got out of graduate school, I ended up learning C for the job I was doing at the time (I've since drifted into the IDL/Matlab world and now I find I'm rusty in all of them!).
You also have to be careful what you consider a grown-up language. By the time I got out of graduate school, C++ was all the rage and I kept hearing how they couldn't believe that any serious programmer would program in a non-object-oriented language unless they were either old or a Luddite.
I know Matlab has really low (or no) cost for educational use
Usually I don't feed ACs, but here I am astonished and ask for clarifications, because we, as educational institution with a 'university' in its name, have to pay horrendous sums for the licenses of Matlab. One single seat license is close to the campus license price of Microsoft.