Teaching Introductory Quantum Engineering to Science and Engineering Students with Diverse Educational Backgrounds

Quantum Information and Science Engineering (QISE) is an emerging field, requiring the training of a future workforce with proficiencies in the building and operation of quantum machines. This workforce will be composed of multidisciplinary students, creating a pedagogical difficulty for a single-semester course with diverse student backgrounds. We employ an approach to teaching an Introduction to Quantum Engineering which favors an audience less trained in the traditional physics formalisms for quantum; an attempt to make the important quantum phenomena more digestible. While our pilot course was composed of students from sophomore year up to graduate school, and from various STEM fields, it informs primarily the lower-level limits of what future courses can be offered in QISE. We employed a pictorial representation of quantum gates, creating an approachable abstraction of concepts like superposition and entanglement, which served to teach students the operations that a quantum computer may perform while forgoing the cognitive difficulties of linear algebra. Moreover, this allowed the discussions to include the coding of quantum computers using cloud-based platforms (i.e., IBM Quantum Composer). It is possible to create variations of the course which may serve students at differing levels of education, and the courses will best be complemented by the inclusion of lab-like exercises involving the implementation of these fundamental concepts and quantum algorithms in quantum simulators.