CS for Non-CS Science Students: Course Design Under Constraints

Abstract

This paper discusses the development of two multidisciplinary computer science courses at Mount Royal University that serve science students: COMP 2001 and COMP 2008. COMP 2001, an introductory course, was redesigned in 2014 with a multidisciplinary audience in mind. A new focus was put on the design of assignments that utilize real problems from general science studies. A follow-up course, COMP 2008, is currently being designed to include more advanced data manipulation and analysis and an introduction to relational databases using SQLite.