Elizabeth Weidman

Belhaven College

At Belhaven College, we are required to integrate faith and learning in every class that we teach. This can be quite a daunting task in computer science. Luckily we are not expected to do it overnight. I am not (I’m sorry to say) a Bible scholar. I get lost if you start talking a bunch of philosophical jargon. But I love the Lord and I love computer science and I love teaching at Belhaven. So my ongoing project is to develop ways to integrate faith and learning in my courses. My Intro to Computers does a term paper where they must prove the existence of God and a newspaper, Nazareth News, dated 1 B.C., which reports Mary and Joseph’s story. Each student writes an interview with one of the town’s people who either believes the claims or (more likely) believe it to be a good cover story for an unplanned pregnancy. Web Technology does an “Interview with God” using Flash. Web Technology II does a semester long study of CyberEthics. In Programming I and II, we discuss the power of prayer. I encourage them to pray while programming. They write a programming prayer that must be exclusively a prayer for guidance in the problems they encounter while programming. This prayer matures greatly from programming I to programming II.

At this workshop I plan to concentrate on finding appropriate integration projects for two of the courses I will teach this fall, Data Structures and Formal Languages and Automata.