Treffer: Structuring the Python Programming Component of a Senior-Level Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Course.

Python has been blended into an introductory nuclear engineering course within the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) to provide industry-relevant training for upper-year undergraduate students. As programming is a cumulative skill, a lack of consistent, mandated practice in the current Chemical Engineering curriculum at UNB created a need to integrate coding into individual courses using a highly structured approach. Based on the dense course content and the type of problems students were frequently working with (mainly solving ordinary differential equations), the introductory nuclear engineering course within the Nuclear Power program option in Chemical Engineering was identified as a good choice to test such a code integration method. A three-stage gradual approach was used: Background Readings (BRs) for selfstudy (fundamental concepts and worked code examples), low-stakes, formative Coding Exercises (CEs), with a more advanced problem from the BRs, and lastly, a coding component to the core Assignments. Each stage presents examples relevant to course topics. This paper describes two offerings of the course after addition of the coding component. A discussion of the student’s perceived difficulty of each of the three stages of integration and the change in comfort level with reading and writing code, as determined by surveys, is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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