2016 article

Attitudes of life science majors towards computational modeling in introductory physics

2016 PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH CONFERENCE, pp. 208–211.

By: B. Lunk* & R. Beichner n 

TL;DR: An exploratory study is conducted to help learn about life-science majors’ attitudes towards programming, suggesting that this tool could provide an accessible way to scaffold more rigorous computational modeling tasks in the classroom. (via Semantic Scholar)
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
4. Quality Education (Web of Science)
Source: Web Of Science
Added: August 6, 2018

Biological and health care majors comprise one of the largest populations of students enrolled in physics courses each year. Because of this, there is a growing interest within the physics and biology communities to restructure the introductory physics courses for life science majors to better support the needs of these students. In this context, computational modeling could prove to be an accessible and compelling tool for exploring biologically and medically relevant phenomena within in the physics course. As a first step, we conducted an exploratory study to help us learn about life-science majors’ attitudes towards programming. Our observations suggest that while these students held an apprehension towards programming, they appeared to be more receptive towards spreadsheets, suggesting that this tool could provide an accessible way to scaffold more rigorous computational modeling tasks in the classroom.