written by Brandon R. Lunk and Robert J. Beichner

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.

• Download PERC2016_Lunk.pdf - 2559kb Adobe PDF Document

Last Modified November 30, 2016

This file is included in the full-text index.