It is observed that the one-dimensional heat equation with certain nonlinear boundary conditions can be reformulated as a system of coupled Volterra integral equations. A product trapezoidal scheme is proposed for the numerical solution of this integral equation system, and some numerical experiments are given to compare the performances of this integral equation approach and the Crank-Nicholson method applied to the original initial-boundary value problem. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.