Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2023
Volume 68, Number 3
Las Vegas, Nevada (March 5-10)
Virtual (March 20-22); Time Zone: Pacific Time
Session F51: Computing in Physics EducationEducation Invited Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FED Chair: Daniel Claes, University of Nebraska - Lincoln Room: Room 321 |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 8:00AM - 8:36AM |
F51.00001: PICUP and the national scene for integrating computing in physics education Invited Speaker: Marie Lopez del Puerto Computational skills are becoming more and more important to Physics students’ success in both industry and graduate school [1]. In order to help students develop these skills, Physics faculty need to modify the curriculum and provide scaffolding throughout the four years of an undergraduate education. How do we support the faculty? The Partnership for Integrating Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP) supports a growing community of faculty who share the goal of integrating computation into Physics courses. PICUP runs workshops at regional and national meetings, hosts an online peer-reviewed collection of curricular materials (www.gopicup.org), and connects faculty through a Slack channel, monthly webinars, and conferences. In this talk, I will give a brief history of the partnership and how it has impacted the national scene for integrating computing in physics, pointing out the many resources and support available for faculty. I will highlight materials in the PICUP collection that I and others have adapted for a variety of courses, from introductory to advanced, and from small classes to those with hundreds of students, and discuss how those materials fit into and enhance those courses. Finally, I will discuss some of the curriculum development faculty have engaged in as a result of their involvement with PICUP, and advertise upcoming events and ways faculty can get involved. |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 8:36AM - 9:12AM |
F51.00002: Teaching computational modeling and data analysis to facilitate the integration of computing in physics and beyond Invited Speaker: Devin Silvia One of the core missions of Michigan State University's Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering (CMSE) is to provide education in computational modeling and data science to MSU's undergraduate and graduate students. In this presentation, I will describe our creation of CMSE 201, "Introduction to Computational Modeling and Data Analysis," which is intended to be a standalone course teaching undergraduate students (both STEM and non-STEM) core concepts in data analysis, data visualization, and computational modeling. I will discuss the rationale behind the "flipped classroom" instructional model that we have been using and explain the course's design principles and implementation. The concepts and skills students learn in this course can be used by other disciplines as the foundation for integrating computing across the curricula in undergraduate degree programs. I will highlight how the Department of Physics and Astronomy at MSU has successfully demonstrated how this can be done and encourage other programs and institutions to consider a similar approach. |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 9:12AM - 9:48AM |
F51.00003: Full integration of computation and broad-scale assessment approaches at IUPUI Invited Speaker: Andy D Gavrin Our goal as a department is to “make computation normal.” That is, our students should graduate considering computational methods as a normal means of approaching physics problems, on par with analytical techniques. To accomplish this goal, we have embarked on an effort to incorporate computational methods as significant part of every course taken by our majors. Our baseline goal is that at least 25% of all work will be computational in nature. This talk will focus on three aspects of the project: the change process that underlies this effort, the lessons we learned during the process, and our efforts to assess and revise. We have largely completed the goal of incorporating computational methods at the 25% level, and we are now focusing our efforts on assessing the results to guide ongoing change. We have developed a survey instrument that measures students’ attitudes and self-efficacy with respect to key computational methods. We have established the validity and reliability of this instrument and will show results obtained using it [1]. We will also describe ongoing efforts to evaluate student achievement of our learning goals using a two-tiered rubric approach. |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 9:48AM - 10:24AM |
F51.00004: Queering computation and modeling in an agency-based computational physics course Invited Speaker: Tim Atherton Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is essential for physicists' careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and has tended to be constructed narrowly as a route to solving physics problems. Moreover, little attention has been paid to who is doing computation vis a vis marginalization, nor to the exclusionary culture around contemporary computing. In this talk we consider how to "queer" computation by proposing an educational environment that centralizes inquiry, agency and scientific practices. Central to the design is Making, the creation of shared physical and digital artifacts intended to promote students' creativity and self-expression alongside doing physics. The talk will introduce the design of our environment and present evidence from our explorations of 5 years of implementation at Tufts University. The presentation will conclude with data on how queer people have engaged in this environment and prospects for future refinement, as well as ideas on how the community can engage productively with DEIJ issues in computation. |
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 10:24AM - 11:00AM |
F51.00005: Using Computing in Physics at the Molecular and Cellular Level (P@MCL) Invited Speaker: Lisa J Lapidus In 2016, Michigan State University began a pilot of a new curriculum of introductory physics for life scientists. Because biology-related applications on the macroscale are complex and require mathematics beyond introductory calculus, the focus is entirely on applications from molecular and cellular biology, which are amenable to computing. The curriculum is designed around two main themes, diffusion and electric dipoles. In this talk I shall discuss how diffusion is explored as an emergent phenomenon of elastic collisions by building from one to many balls in a box. Extending the simulations to realistic force fields also illuminates bound states. Snapshots of these simulations are introduced as microstates and provide the framework for introducing entropy from the perspective of statistical mechanics. They also mirror molecular dynamics simulations regularly used by computational biologists to study real phenomena such as protein folding and function. |
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