Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries in the First Year: A New Introductory Integrated Science Course for STEM Majors

To help undergraduates make connections among disciplines so they are able to approach, evaluate, and contribute to the solutions of important global problems, our campus has been focused on interdisciplinary research and education opportunities across the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This paper describes the mobilization, planning, and implementation of a first-year interdisciplinary course for STEM majors that integrates key concepts found in traditional first-semester biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics courses. This team-taught course, Integrated Quantitative Science (IQS), is half of a first-year student’s schedule in both semesters and is composed of a double lecture and a weekly lab and workshop. Features of this first-year course, including themes and concepts covered each semester, some of the materials developed, lessons learned, challenges, and preliminary measures of success are described

Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries in the First Year: A New Introductory Integrated Science Course for STEM Majors

To help undergraduates make connections among disciplines so they are able to approach, evaluate, and contribute to the solutions of important global problems, our campus has been focused on interdisciplinary research and education opportunities across the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This paper describes the mobilization, planning, and implementation of a first-year interdisciplinary course for STEM majors that integrates key concepts found in traditional first-semester biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics courses. This team-taught course, Integrated Quantitative Science (IQS), is half of a first-year student’s schedule in both semesters and is composed of a double lecture and a weekly lab and workshop. Features of this first-year course, including themes and concepts covered each semester, some of the materials developed, lessons learned, challenges, and preliminary measures of success are described

Testing the Isotach Prototype Hardware Switch Interface Unit

This paper discusses the development of these prototype versions, the current state of the SIU debugging process, and the design of the test suite. In addition, five appendices are included as a guide for those who will continue the SIU testing efforts. These discuss various implementation specific data structures and routines, offer tips for programming the LANai, provide pointers to the code for the various prototype versions, give values for some implementation specific constants, and provide pointers to additional information

Introducing Computer Science in an Integrated Science Course

This paper describes our implementation and experience of incorporating computer science concepts into a team-taught, first-year interdisciplinary course for prospective science majors at the University of Richmond. The course integrates essential concepts from each of five STEM disciplines: biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics. Including computer science in this course faces three primary challenges: few of the students have any CS background; the time devoted to CS instruction is reduced compared to a traditional introductory CS course; and the spirit of the course requires the CS material to be highly integrated with the other disciplines. Here we discuss our experience from three-plus years of offering the course and its impact on the major/minor pool of students in our own discipline

Cycle Synchronization in Cyclone Networks

Networks with time-cyclic allocation of node resources (e.g. SONET or a wireless network using TDMA media access scheduling) require a degree of synchronization in order to guarantee that cycle lengths and drifts remain within acceptable tolerances. Cyclone is a class of such networks. By requiring applications to reserve resources in both time and space, a balance is achieved between arriving and departing flows, ensuring a lack of congestion and eliminating the need for flow control. This paper presents a lightweight cycle synchronization algorithm for Cyclone networks, and shows through both theoretical analysis and simulation that even in the presence of timing errors, both cycle length jitter and cycle phase differences fall well within tolerable levels. (Cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-17