A new course was designed, CS 205 Introduction to Computational Programming. This course appeared in the 1994/95 SDSU catalog and was taught by Stewart in Fall 1994. This is a sophomore level course whose prerequisite is one year of calculus. The computing environment used is MATLAB from MathWorks, Inc. The C programming language is introduced via the MATLAB script writing capability. The process of conceptualizing problems in vector notation is natural for MATLAB, providing a smooth transition to the vector-oriented computing highlighted in the CS 575 Supercomputing course. Computer graphics are used in all class examples and computational experiments since this is an integral part of MATLAB. The recently released Student Edition MATLAB Version 4 provides students with an individual copy of the software that runs on their home Macintosh or IBM/PC that is equivalent to the network version available on the instruction computers on campus.
This course is offerred Fall 1995 at SDSU and the materials are available.
The rapidly evolving world of undergraduate curriculum development in high performance computing benefits from multidisciplinary work. At SDSU, there has been a great deal of cooperation with the Departments of Mathematical Sciences, Physics (which now has an undergraduate degree program in Computational Physics), Chemistry, Geology, Astronomy and more. An interesting source that documents academic programs in Computational Science is provided by Dr. C. D. Swanson at Cray Research Inc.
http://www.cray.com/PUBLIC/ind/univ/Comp_Sci_Paper.html (WWW link)