An introduction to programming for students in sciences

It is widely recognized that students in biology, the earth sciences, chemistry and the natural sciences need some basic knowledge of programming in order to find out what they can and should expect from the use of computing media. Often, however, their curricula does not include any courses in computer science. It is possible to tackle this educational problem by introducing elements of computer science into the mathematics and/or statistics courses which do appear in their curricula. In this paper we suggest a method for integrating the teaching of the two different topics, for example, programming with calculus or statistics. The suggested approach has been extensively tested in mathematics courses for earth sciences, chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry students at the University of Genova, Italy. We also believe that our approach provides some useful suggestions towards the solution of similar educational problems in the higher level courses of secondary schools.