9451507 Gries This instructional computer laboratory will be used for a novel sequence of courses that starts with an introductory programming course targeted at students having no previous experience in programming. The laboratory will be used to teach this programming course in an interactive environment. Another point in the sequence will be a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering course in system dynamics. This is an upper-level course for majors. New equipment is needed that will enable these students to do interesting work with dynamic simulation. The existence of a teaching laboratory will be important when instructing the students in the use of their software. This sequence is the result of ideas from the faculty in the two departments. They plan to exploit the joint use of the facility to build bridges between the introductory computer science courses and upper-level courses in engineering and science. Using the systems dynamics course as a target, they will try to facilitate a student's progress from this introductory programming course, to our more challenging introductory course for students with a knowledge of calculus, and finally to the systems dynamics and other upper-level engineering courses. This joint effort will be incorporated into the development of a text for the programming course. The laboratory will have a significant impact locally at Cornell. The programming text produced should help other colleges and universities to institute a similar approach. The enrichments to the course and text achieved through work with Mechanical Engineering will make the text quite different from anything now available.
