  Computation has revolutionized science and is gradually making its way into
science teaching and learning. However, we currently lack theoretical
frameworks to make sense of how students learn to use computation as a
disciplinary tool. In this study, we propose disciplinary computational
literacy as a productive theoretical lens on this subject. This theoretical
perspective views computation as a new type of literacy consisting of material,
cognitive, and social elements. We argue that these elements will necessarily
vary by discipline and use case studies of two pairs of students writing
computational essays in an intermediate physics course to examine how
disciplinary computational literacy looks and is built at an undergraduate
level. Through these case studies we see the pairs leveraging the different
elements of their computational literacy to both engage with and produce
computational literature in their discipline, while also engaging in a process
of epistemic negotiation between their interests, the course goals, available
tools, and their basis of computational literacy. These cases show how
computational literacy can highlight the ways in which scientific computing
helps students build disciplinary understanding and also shows that
computational essays, as a genre of computational literature, are a useful
epistemic form for developing computational literacy.
