Cottrell Scholars Advance Effort to Enhance Programming Courses
Several Cottrell Scholars who participated in an RCSA-sponsored project to use Python to enhance science education have contributed to a new American Chemical Society (ACS) Symposium Series book, "Teaching Programming across the Chemistry Curriculum."
Cottrell Scholar 2003 Daniel Crawford, chemistry, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, wrote the preface. Chapter authors include: CS 2019 Jay Foley, chemistry, William Paterson University; CS 2018 Grace Stokes, chemistry, Santa Clara University; and CS 2012 Geoffrey Hutchison, chemistry, University of Pittsburgh.
RCSA’s 2019 Cottrell Scholar Collaborative Award, "Enhancing Science Courses by Integrating Python (ESCIP),” enabled project lead Stokes and her Cottrell Scholar colleagues to establish a network of chemistry, physics and astronomy faculty who use Python to teach undergraduate courses. Besides Stokes and Foley, the group’s PI also include: CS 2018 Claude-André Faucher-Giguére, astronomy, Northwestern University; CS 2016 Dusan Keres, physics, University of California, San Diego; CS 2017 Tyler Luchko, physics, California State University, Northridge; CS 2018 Chad Risko, chemistry, University of Kentucky; CS 2019 Christine Vizcarra, chemistry, Barnard College; and Fulbright-Cottrell Scholar 2019 Hongbin Zhang, physics, Technische Universität Darmstadt.
The network has since grown to 65 members, including faculty from across the globe, and uses a Slack channel to collaborate, ask for help, and share best practices.
The group organized two virtual workshops in June 2020 to align with the 2020 Cottrell Scholar Conference theme of online education. These workshops were attended by 58 educators including chemistry, physics, and astronomy faculty from both R1 and primarily undergraduate institutions.
Goals of the two workshops were to help attendees use Python programming to enhance existing learning objectives and incorporate programming into multiple courses across the science curriculum, both online and in-person.
The editors of the new ACS book, Ashley Ringer McDonald and Jessica Nash, helped Cottrell Scholars organize the workshops, and the RCSA award supported their roles as keynote and moderator, respectively. Ringer McDonald is an associate and Nash is a software scientist and education lead with the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI), which is directed by Crawford.
In addition to keynote talks at the workshops by Ringer McDonald, Foley and Nash, breakout group discussions were led by Stokes, Luchko, Risko, and Vizcarra.
The ESCIP group is now planning to host an in-person workshop in July 2022, immediately before the 2022 Cottrell Scholar Conference in Tucson, Arizona.
