INSIDE DOUGLAS COLLEGE / JUNE 20, 1989

 

 

 
 

Bob

Browne
hemistry

Instructor

At first glance, chemisty and
computer science don’t have a lot
in common. But both disciplines
can have a meaningful relationship,
according to Bob Browne, who
teaches chemistry at Douglas Col-
lege.

For the past several years,
Browne has been working on dif-
ferent ways to combine the two.

“Chemistry is turning out to be
very computer oriented," says
Browne, who calls himself a physi-
cal chemist.

“We’re interested in solving
equations, looking at large amounts
of data and making sense of it.

“It’s amazing what you can get
computers to do in relation to sort-
ing and explaining chemistry data.”

Browne, an instructor at Douglas
College since 1971, says he’s now
looking at all available computer
software with two goals in mind.

First, he wants to bring a com-
puter into the classroom to use as a
teaching tool. He also wants to en-
sure a computer is available for
students’ use in the lab. It would
provide “‘a little bit of the real life
stuff for students,” he says, refer-
ring to the fact that most analytical
chemistry labs are now highly com-
puterized.

Browne says he first became
aware Of the value of computers in

  

 

 

 

 

 

chemistry in 1967, when he was
working on his Ph.D. thesis at the
University of British Columbia.

“The calculations I was doing
were complicated,” he says. “With
my first results it took me four days
to calculate a single number.”

Then one of his chemistry stu-
dents who worked at the U.B.C.
Computing Centre came by and
looked over his shoulder. The stu-
dent informed Browne that he
could write a computer program to
drastically reduce the time it took
to complete calculations.

“He wrote the program over the
noon-hour, took some of my data,
and by two o’clock in the aftemoon
he had a print-out of all the calcula-
tions it took me four days to do,”
says Browne.

 

“I decided I’d better learn more
about computers.”

Years later, as an instructor at
the College, Browne enlisted the
aid of the College’s central com-
puter to help solve a problem, but
he still felt at a disadvantage com-
pared to university professors who
taught chemistry.

The professors had teaching as-
sistants to do the long and tedious
marking of students’ laboratory cal-
culations. As a college instructor,
however, Browne was also respon-
sible for lectures and lab
experiments.

With the help of a computer
science student, Browne developed
the Computer Assisted Laboratory
Evaluation (CALE).

continued on page 4

 

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Photo by Toby Snelgrove