Session N06: Excellence in Physics Education Award

Historical overview of computation in physics education and the development of the Partnership for Integrating Computation in Undergraduate Physics (PICUP).

Although the use of computers has permeated much of physics research over the past sixty years, until recently the use of computational modeling of physical phenomena has rarely been seen as essential to physics undergraduate teaching. In this talk we will provide a brief history of using computers and computational physics with undergraduates, and how the slow adoption of this work motivated the establishment of the Partnership for Integrating Computation in Undergraduate Physics (PICUP), an organization that has played a leading role in fostering the implementation of computational physics in undergraduate education.

    

Historical overview of computation in physics education and the development of the Partnership for Integrating Computation in Undergraduate Physics (PICUP)

Although the use of computers has permeated much of physics research over the past sixty years, until recently the use of computational modeling of physical phenomena has rarely been seen as essential to physics undergraduate teaching. In this talk we will provide a brief history of using computers and computational physics with undergraduates, and how the slow adoption of this work motivated the establishment of the Partnership for Integrating Computation in Undergraduate Physics (PICUP), an organization that has played a leading role in fostering the implementation of computational physics in undergraduate education.   

Supporting the integration of computing in physics education

Computing has revolutionized how modern science is done. Modern scientists use computational techniques to reduce mountains of data, to simulate impossible experiments, and to develop intuition about the behavior of complex systems. Much of the research completed by modern scientists would be impossible without the use of computing. And yet, while computing is a crucial tool of practicing scientists, most modern science curricula do not reflect its importance and utility. In this talk, I will discuss the urgent need to construct such curricula in physics and present research that investigates the challenges at a variety of all scales from the largest (institutional structures) to the smallest (student understanding of a concept). I will discuss how the results of this research can be leveraged to facilitate the computational revolution in science education. This research will help us understand and develop institutional incentives, effective teaching practices, evidence-based course activities, and valid assessment tools.   

The PICUP Collection: Resources for integrating computation into undergraduate physics courses

The PICUP Collection (at www.compadre.org/PICUP/) provides peer-reviewed Exercise Sets of computational physics problems with instructor materials and solutions in a variety of computational languages from spreadsheets and vPython to Mathematica, MATLAB, C++, and Python. These materials have been submitted by a wide variety of physics instructors and cover concepts from introductory physics to upper-level physics, and include Exercise Sets that tie to experiments. You can download these materials and use them in your physics classes as they are, or modify them to suit your needs. I will highlight some of the resources that are available in the PICUP collection, and demonstrate how you can use these materials, and even contribute to the collection.