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Abstract Interdisciplinary professionals with both domain and computing skills are in high demand in our increasingly digital workplace. Universities have begun offering interdisciplinary computing degrees to meet this demand, but many community college students are not provided learning experiences that foster their self-efficacy in pursuing them. The Applied Programming Experiences (APEX) program aims to address this issue by embedding computing modules into introductory biology and statistics courses at community colleges. Here, we describe an initial cohort of instructors who adopted APEX modules and then provide preliminary evidence of significant increases in students' interest and confidence in applied computing after experience with these modules. These findings suggest that embedding programming exercises in introductory biology and statistics classes can have a significant impact on students' perceptions of computing. We will continue to assess the experiences of both instructors and students as our program expands, in turn allowing us to improve the APEX program and encourage nationwide adoption of embedding computing into popular introductory community college courses.
Carr et al. (Sat,) studied this question.