The HP100/101 Solution?

We have struggled with the Honors first-year sequence for years and knew even without the results of your alumni surveys that it would be the most criticized aspect of the Honors Program. At last, we have a solution to the problem of teaching computer skills without resorting to the traditional class setups of ES100 and IS211. For our solution, we turned, as we have often do, to Honors students and, in this instance, invited Honors TAs to design and teach the computer equivalencies to ES100 (MatLab) and IS211 (SAP).

That is what Conner Shane, Andrew Bingham, and Romana Semouchtchak did for us this year. They held once week tutorials to help the first-year students gain the necessary skills for half a semester and then guided the students through their MatLab or SAP projects. The projects were as varied as the students themselves:

• Examine the cost and effectiveness of government programs enacted to combat the global spread of HIV/AIDS.
• Study the properties of gas particles as predicted by ideal gas law.
• Use speed and driver data to predict the winner of NASCAR races.
• Develop an encryption system to safeguard the process of file transfer.

While there were glitches in this first iteration, the results were also striking. As some the Honors veterans of ES100 who saw the first-year presentations testified to, the frosh knew their MatLab:

Watching the frosh do graphical user interfaces and crazy loops really showed me the power of MatLab and what it is capable of doing. The regular ES100 class doesn’t teach anything.

I know they learned at least twice the amount I learned last year. . . . I believe that what the Honors Program did in teaching MatLab should be incorporated across the entire campus.

Of course, such success had its cost, especially in the early weeks of the experiment. Initially, the frosh felt overwhelmed with their experience with MatLab and asked why couldn’t we just teach them the way they were taught in their math, physics, and chem courses. One very talented student even quit the program as a result. Andrew and Conner grew frustrated as well, complaining that the frosh didn’t ask questions and then complained because things weren’t explained clearly. But in the end, the TAs and the frosh became more like team attacking a problem together. In describing their students accomplishments to the Honors Council, Conner, Romana, and Andrew had the pride of new parents.

There were other changes in the first-year sequence as well, now called The Ethical and Social Consequences of Research. All the first-year students were in a single class taught by Gary Kelly. When they did projects like their MatLab ones, they had to explore the assumptions built into their computer models, to think about what their computer simulation of reality would and would not represent accurately. A postscript in that regard, as you can imagine, the NASCAR project had a quite a few assumptions built into it, making the simulation fun to build but questionable as a prediction tool.

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