Big Ideas
In some ways the current HHMI grant has been doing just this during the past couple of years. We have a good start on the text for this in the document we worked on last Summer, it's located here.
Modeled on Earlham's strong history of bibliographic instruction.
Team-taught, primary course instructor and someone from computer science.
Eco-Bio offers a great opportunity to combine field data collection/analysis with computational methods in a science context. This would require hardware (hand-held devices, laptops, wireless networking, etc.) and a fair amount of design effort but the overall impact and pedagogy should be powerful.
Small Ideas
Hardware
Tom Steffes and Tom Kirk probably have some ideas for this item.
Other
Linkages to the upcoming capital campaign, shows institutional commitment to science generally.
HHMI's report on what science education needs, how do we address items they identify?
Support for a post-bacc position in computer science specifically tasked to work with faculty developing and teaching either the computational methods course modules and/or the computational methods course. Four years of support and then the College will find funds to continue the position? Any of the course development items will require lots of help to organize and deliver the first couple of times.