Comment by unethical_ban
7 days ago
<specialty> for non-majors isn't radical.
"Stats for business"
"PE for physicists"
Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?
7 days ago
<specialty> for non-majors isn't radical.
"Stats for business"
"PE for physicists"
Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?
"PE for physicists." Touche. ;-)
Dating myself, my college had Pascal for CS majors, and FORTRAN for physicists. The FORTRAN class was math heavy, and we had a higher level course in process control as well, plus we all took the math class in numerical analysis.
When my daughter was in college, it was Java and Python. She took Java. I had suggested to her that she could easily keep up with the CS students, which she did.
I very much favor better training in programming for scientists. Taught by a scientist. The "intro to Matlab" that many students take is really too lightweight. Also, as for languages becoming obsolete, the disciplines that I learned in the 1980s are still of value today even if the languages have changed.
>PE for physicists
You meant juggling and fencing?
A more pragmatic answer is who’s going to teach it? Someone with weak skills in the discipline? Or someone with weak skills in computing? (This is a glib answer)
Finding people at the true intersection is surprisingly hard, and those people tend to be busy.
In grad school I took and advanced statistics course in the psych department. The concepts were new to me but not to the folks in the discipline. However the math (matrix multiplication) and basic coding were easy for me and very hard for them.
There was only one person in the department who could teach it, other faculty did that type of work entirely as “clients” which just ran tools and code from others.
Who teaches the "<math specialty> for business" courses? IME, it was math professors.
It's not unreasonable for the biology department to come up with the common programming use-cases for their students, then have the CS department build a course around those skills.
My minor was Bioinformatics. The biology department taught foundational course like biology and genetics and the CS department taught the courses on processing data.
> Who teaches the "<math specialty> for business" courses? IME, it was math professors.
IME its the same...I've also found that approach works less well at generating good learning. It (seemingly inherently) results in decontextualized knowledge and does not get students over the application gap, which is the exact problem that such things are trying to solve.
It is. When I was in school we had a matlab class for grad students in other departments.
I don’t know why you’d try to throw CS majors and Biology majors looking to cobble together scripts into the same class.