Teaching Computing to STEM Students via Visualization Tools

Information technology is evolving fast and steady over the years providing more and more tools for society to use. There is an increasing need and implementation of computation in the conduct of modern scientific research and experimentation. Computational thinking has been scarcely understood by STEM undergraduates if their majors are not computer sciences. We explore computation projects into existing courses via visualization computational tools to increase the number of STEM students who graduate with discipline specific computational skills. The goal of this paper was to report our efforts for increasing the number of students with experience using computation in science. Discipline specific tools were chosen and implemented in the respective courses, for example Chemsketch in chemistry. Hands-on labs were designed to familiarize instructors and students so it can be helpful to smooth the learning curve in STEM undergraduate student