2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Numerous studies have established several positive outcomes associated with meaningful research experiences undertaken by students as undergraduates. These benefits include enhanced critical thinking skills, improved learning abilities in subsequent course work, and increased pursuit of graduate studies. In this paper, we report on our supervision of several undergraduate students over the past couple of years in the area of quantum computing at _______ University. Case studies of four projects involving six students are described. An assessment of our student research is given and recommended best practices for undergraduate research in this area are detailed. How this work dovetails with our plans to implement a multi-disciplinary introductory quantum computing course next spring will also be described.
We first worked with a pair of undergraduate students in the Summer 2021 on a research project to implement a quantum computing simulator that was built from the ground up using just the Python programming language and the Numpy library. The goal was to use this simulator as a framework for a planned course that introduces quantum computing to undergraduate students as well as for subsequent research in quantum computing. Two additional students did an independent research study course in quantum computing in the Spring of 2022 where they studied some specific applications of quantum computing such as its use to efficiently solve the travelling salesman problem. This past summer 2022, two additional students were engaged in research: one studied how to extend our quantum computer simulator to simulate Shor’s algorithm using sparse matrices and the other investigated an aspect of machine learning: the viability of building a simple classifier on a quantum computer.
As we have not yet implemented our quantum computing (QC) course, part of the challenge of doing research in QC is getting the students up to speed. Towards this end, we have developed a set of tutorials and readings together with assignments. This material is also helpful as we aim to teach an introductory course in QC next spring. The planned course will build upon these tutorials and have mini-research assignments that can be developed into full-fledged research projects afterwards under the supervision of a faculty member.
Some observations and guidelines for successfully engaging students in undergraduate QC research will be detailed in this paper. In general, students are usually motivated to do research when they are tackling an open research question and they know they are making meaningful contributions to the body of scientific knowledge. The challenge is offering undergraduate students authentic research experiences that are within their capabilities. We have noted that working in the area of quantum computing itself is exciting to the students due to its cutting-edge nature as an emerging technology, and there are a variety of research projects that are accessible to undergraduates. In particular, we hypothesize that teaching QC from a coding perspective (e.g., writing code to help understand the theory) makes the field more accessible to our undergraduate students and enables them to make contributions in a semester or summer of work. With the development and implementation of our introductory QC course next Spring, we expect a wider range of appropriate research projects to be feasible. A preliminary assessment of the research projects in our upcoming QC course will be given in the final version of our paper.