Project ACCESS: Advanced computational curriculum for engineering and science students

An upper division, computational laboratory-based course in scientific computing is being developed. The project includes three important components: (1) a case-study method in which topics are taught with an example from the "real" world of science and engineering; (2) the various case-studies are developed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty in order to emphasize all parts of scientific computation: basic science, analytic methods, numerical methods, and visualization; and (3) the students develop solutions on a variety of computational platforms including personal computers, RISC (reduced instruction set computer) workstations, and supercomputers. A case-study description is presented.<>