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Eastern Michigan University.JOHN Yprilanti, MI MOORE 48197
Bits and Pieces, 16 Edltor'l Note Most authors Of Blts and Pieces will make available listings and/or machine-readable versions of their programs. Please read each description carefully todetermine compatibility with your own computing environment before requesting materials from any of the authors. Revised Guidelines for Authors of Bits and Pieces appeared in the December 1982 issue of the Journal Several programs described in this article and marked as such are available hom Project SERAPHIM. if you do not already have a SERAPHIM catalog, request one from: Dr. John W. Moore. Director, Project SERAPHIM. Department of Chemistry, Eastern Michigan University. Ypsilanti. MI 48197.
What Do We Do When A 1 Students Have Personal Computers? John W. Moore and Elizabeth A. Moore
Eastern Michigan University Ypsilanti. MI 48197 A hit more than a decade ago many of us were debating the fairness of allowing studentsto use pocket calculators while taking exams. Not all students could afford a $400 HP-31, and so some of us made departmental calculators available to all students while others simply banned the machines from exams. A few years later the $25 calculator relegated this debate to the category of "How many Angels can stand on the head of a pin?," though not all of us have yet caught on to the fact that many programmable calculators with magnetic storage are supplied with programs that allow rote solution of essentially all the solution-equilibrium problems we are so fond of putting on exams. Calculators a t low prices have affected the way we teach and the types of problems we ask students to do. and manv of us have not vet entirelv. caueht .. up with tht, new technolog?. At a time uhrn the nvlehborh,xd K-Mart iksrlline VIC-20'1 a t $160 or less, when serious husiness-oriented and scientific microcomputers cost well under half the price of the average car, and when the majority of students have cars, we need to t most students have be& askina what chances to e x ~ e cwhen computers.'we are sure that bthers have given this more thought than we, especially persons a t schools like Stevens Institute, Clarkson College, and Drexel University, which are requiring and actively helping their students to obtain and use personal computers. Nevertheless we shall hazard a few suggestions. . T o begin with we can stop assuming that computer-aided instruction is out of the question unless a department, college, or university can purchase enough computers so that every student can schedule an hour or two per week of terminal time. Since personal computers are not yet portable in the same sense as pocket calculators, some public machines will be needed and faculty need computers for program development and research, hut by and large we should expect students to use their own micros. We also oneht " to demand that students use more rigorous means of numerical, statistical, and error andvsis. ~articularlvwhen writine laboraton, renorts. It is not essential'for students to program these methods, hut we 730
Journal of Chemical Education
should a t least require knowledge of and experience with black-box, pre-written programs. Moreover, we should be ahle to require a higher level of quality in written assignments once wordprocessing programs are available to all students. Sr. Virginia Orna of the College of New Rochelle already requires that her students draft instrumental lab reports on an Apple, turn in a rough version for preliminary grading, and produce a clean final copy. Also, we ought to be ahle to find imaginative chemical applications for VisiCalc and other spreadsheet programs in addition to using them for gradebooks and income-tax projections. Executives, chemists, and many others in the real world are rapidly adopting such methods; our stndents will have a step up if they have already used them. We also need to pay more attention to communication of microcomputers with minis and espwially mainframe timeshared systems. Micros can be used as terminals to such systems, providing access for students to library catalogs or other databases. More exciting, though, is coupling of micros and big computers, with each doing tasks for which it is best suited. One example of this is the note by Houser in this article, where a microcomputer graphics program has been coupled to numher-crunching quantum chemistry programs that run on mainframes. Another example comes from a recent conversation we had with William Butler a t the University of Michigan. Bill is downloading x-ray structure data to an IBM-PC that he has programmed to display structures and modify data for later transmission hack to the campus Amdahl for another round of refinement. This is possible not only because Bill is a good programmer, but also because his university computer center supports the Apple and IBM-PC by providing standard software that makes possible convenient and accurate transfer of data among the machines. On such a system an instructor could provide programs to be used by students for solving homework prohlems and students could build their own library of useful software. When students were ready to use a program they would call the central computer, quickly make a copy of the program, and then use it a t their leisure without tying up the big computer. Many other changes can be anticipated when students have widespread access to their own computers. Certainly there is an even more urgent need for well-thought-out, appropriate, correct, and user-friendly software, and we would hope the academic community could identify, encourage, and reward persons who can write it. If those readers who have already begun thinking or doing something about such ideas submit their results to this column, we will he glad to see them and share them with readers. Perhaps most exciting of all is the potential synergy between intelligent persons and powerful information-processors. The following quotation of a chemist whose work most of us know gives some inkling of what the future may hold: "I am convinced that Carl Sagan is correct in predicting that the next development in human intelligence will be a partnership between intelligent humans and intelligent machines," Robert A. Plane, President, Clarkson College of Technology.
