Course Details

Course Length & Scheduling

The program has a total of 3 sequenced, online classes, each 11 weeks long. Advisors at Columbus State Community College have a clear understanding of the prerequisites for the program and can help you understand whether you are ready to start, or need any prior preparation to succeed in the course.

Participants will need easy and frequent online access with broadband connection where you are able to install software, and a student version of the commercial software package
MATLAB[1].

Course Details

1. SIMULATION AND MODELING – Entry point into the program. One of the primary uses of computers in science is as a tool to simulate the behavior of a system that is either too large, too complex or too expensive to experiment on directly. In this class, we will build the foundational skills of modeling and simulating systems. Students will interact in groups, and each week the groups will share the results of their work. Models will be drawn from physical, biological, and social sciences, from engineering and from business, economics, and finance.

2. PROGRAMMING AND ALGORITHMS – The more you use a computer, the more often the problem arises. The program you have does something close to what you want, but not really what you want. This is especially true in computational science. So, a central skill set is the knowledge of how to get a computer to do what you want – what a computer scientist would call programming. In this course, we introduce programming and algorithms in the context of scientific computing. You will do so using two widely used scientific software packages: MATLAB, and R.MATLAB. Between them you can calculate the behavior of modes and then analyze that behavior looking for patterns and evidence of behavior. Students are expected to be familiar with using a computer as a tool to do work. Any background with programming will be an advantage, but is not required.

3. METHODS OF COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE – Central to computational science is the ability to move your understanding of a system from a collection of pictures and words into a mathematical model that can be implemented on a computer. After the computer runs the model and produces output, you also need to take that output and extract the meaning – so translate a stream of numbers and equations into words and pictures that contain all the important information. In this class, we build on a previous background with algebra and possibly some statistics to lay the foundation for translation. The student is expected to be familiar with algebraic reasoning, and to understand the concept of rate of change as a descriptive property of a system.

4. OBTAINMENT OF COMP-U CERTIFICATION!

Registration

Click here to register.

For more information, call (614) 287-5858 or e-mail tjones56@cscc.edu