Eitan Geva, Chemistry | 2019-2020
The proposed project is the second phase of an ongoing project based on a novel Compute-to-Learn (C2L) pedagogy. The C2L pedagogy was designed to simulate an authentic research experience as part of the undergraduate physical chemistry curriculum, including themes like project development, teamwork, peer review, and publication. The pedagogy was implemented over the past 5 years within a one-semester peer-led studio environment, where students developed programming skills through the creation of Mathematica interactive visualizations of physical chemistry concepts. This innovative active learning approach resulted in above than 50% participation of female students, which is unusual for a programming course. Moving forward into the second phase, we aim to transition the C2L pedagogy from Mathematica to Python (a more commonly-used public domain programming language). The new curriculum will also aim at utilizing inquiry-based instruction through instructor-created templates of physical chemistry problems. The students will engage with the problems by building visualizations via Python and will incorporate these visualizations into an end-of-semester project. This project will comprise of the creation of a dynamic Jupiter notebook to describe and visualize a physical chemistry or math concepts and the publication of the finalized project to a C2L open source Git repository. This repository will serve as a resource through which future chemistry students could learn from their peers and chemistry faculty could obtain visualizations that they can use when teaching courses on those topics.