Programming As a Catalyst for System Understanding, 2019

The project, a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project, originally sought to investigate whether students' understanding of dynamic systems was positively or negatively affected by having to model the system they were to investigate in Python. The data, except for the reflection assignments, were collected during the work on the course's last submission. The reflection assignments were requested afterwards. After a thorough evaluation of the project and the course, the project staff decided that a shift in focus would make sense. The purpose of the project was thus to investigate students' response to the transition from student-passive to student-active learning and the use of programming and "computational practices" in a subject in geoscience. In line with the SoTL tradition, the data is used to improve teaching, and the work will mainly be aimed at providing tips, advice and tools to other teachers in a similar situation as in this project.