Programmatic-scale Integration of Computation into An Undergraduate Physics Curriculum

CSU San Bernardino is a regional, comprehensive institution that primarily serves undergraduates. When the CSUSB Physics and Astronomy department had the opportunity to transform our program in 2020, we made the decision to formally embed aspects of programming and computation throughout our curriculum. This was motivated by recent society reports (e.g. PHYS21) that illustrated what skills would best prepare our physics students for 21st century careers and to better align students programming coursework with disciplinary practices. Major changes include rethinking how computation is approached in lower division laboratories, building the basics of Python into a new-majors seminar course, and hiring a tenure-track faculty member to design a new Computational Physics course. As part of our design process, two faculty members attended a PICUP workshop, which formed the basis of the activities which were developed for the labs and the seminar courses. In this presentation we will discuss our goals and plan for the integration of computation at the programmatic level. We will also share our approach for how computation is included in specific courses and reflect on how computational skills are developing in our majors.