At the University of Wyoming, under National Science Foundation sponsorship, a series of hands-on laboratory exercises have been developed for the Introduction to Computing course. This course is required of freshmen in all majors except electrical and computer engineering. In the teaching of this freshman course the presenters have observed that the laboratory computing exercises, while physically based, did not really involve any interaction with the physical world.

The stimulus for this development project was that our students majored in engineering to be involved with both ideas and physical objects and that in their first engineering course they were not being exposed to the latter. The hypothesis of this development project is that students need hands-on exposure to the concepts being explored. For example, when curve fitting is being investigated, students can gather data from a simple physical process to then be fit with a model.

Sample Exercises and Solutions (in Excel) are available below.

Funded by the CCLI program of the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education through grant DUE9981060