Course Proposals
Course Proposals
Unfortunately, in my experience, professors frequently forget to frame course content into application areas. This can be due to a handful of reasons, but stressing the relevance of the material to their long term goals invites students' interest and motivation.
Often, this is framing the material into a tool that is used, helpful, or both in their careers and therefore increasing their employability into the job market. For those interested in graduate school and academic research, this is explaining how the concept applies to common research areas and techniques.
Along this line of thought, I have come up with two ideas for courses that I would've appreciated as a student.
Obviously, this title is wordy and needs to be workshopped some, but the focus is to introduce students to what it's like to do computational research as a career. Most courses focus on the technical aspects of program development (or the underlying governing equations) without introducing students to what their day-to-day is actually going to look like. This course serves as an overview and precursor to what their days would look like if the choose to do high-level computational research.
This will be a seminar-style elective course that meets once a week for one credit. There are extensions to the curriculum that could make this course worth two or three credits.
For more information regarding this course, go to this page.
The focus of the course is to build the students' intuition of physics concepts in tangible, practical ways, to help them explain the world around them. This will all be focused on applications the students regularly interact with, with minimal equations, aiming to engage with the students in meaningful ways. At the end of the course, the students should be able to reasonably explain the underlying physics of most of the technology they interact with daily.
This will be a partially-flipped, lecture-style course that meets three days a week for three credits.
For more information regarding this course, go to this page.