This class will introduce students to the art of computational geodynamics — creating, visualizing, and exploring numerical solutions to the differential equations that govern heat transport and fluid flow.  During the course, each student will be guided in making their own program for hydrothermal fluid flow and heat transport.  The course’s programming language is MATLAB, and instructional language is primarily English.  There are no prerequisites to the course, but a willingness to learn and use MATLAB is required.  Topics to be covered include an introduction to finite difference methods, which will be initially developed and applied to 1-D and 2-D heat conduction problems, and finite element methods.  Basic algorithms will be covered, including common techniques (blocking, etc.) used to greatly speed and parallelize typical numerical calculations.  If time permits, we will introduce a ‘meshless’ numerical method, smoothed particle hydrodynamics, in the last weeks of the course.