Copyright ©2002, American Society for Engineering Education ChE’s Teaching Introductory Computing to ChE Students-- A Modern Computing Course with Emphasis on Problem Solving and Programming

An easy recipe for fomenting heated debate among ChE faculty is to inject the topic of introductory computing for ChE students into a discussion. Most faculty will have strong opinions that are only muted by the threat of a teaching assignment to such a course. There are many questions: Who should teach introductory computing to our students? Faculty from computer science, a general engineering department, the ChE department, or others? What should be taught? Traditional programming with Fortran, object-oriented programming with C++, problem solving with tools such as Excel and Mathcad, or various mixtures? In ChE at the University of Colorado, we are no different from many other institutions in that these debates have raged on for decades and continue today. In fact, over the years, our students have taken courses in all the various categories mentioned above. Recently, however, we have settled on a scheme and a course design that is working particularly well and bears consideration by others. In engineering here, introductory computing is taught under an umbrella course number (GEE