Engaging students with computing and climate change through a course in Scientific Computing

Abstract

Course-based undergraduate research (CURE) is an educational paradigm to engage students in authentic research projects as part of their classroom experience. We present a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) for first-year students to get acquainted with the research process and apply the skills of scientific computing to investigate publicly available information on climate change and its impacts. The course trains students in elementary programming skills and computational thinking using the Wolfram language (WL) and the Mathematica platform. The experience also provides students with an introduction to the climate change studies, secondary literature, and policy recommendations provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Students apply the programming, data analysis, and information literacy skills from the course to identify and investigate climate change data to improve their research skills and engage with their peers in a collaborative research experience. The results of our pedagogical experiment are presented in the form of student survey results on the national CURE survey. We highlight student responses toward this learning experience and showcase the positive outcomes compared to results from the nationwide CURE survey of students.