Abstract
A computer-based modeling approach to teaching must be flexible because students and teachers have different skills and varying levels of preparation. Running the “software du jour” is not the objective for integrating computational physics material into the curriculum. Learning computational thinking, how to use computation and computer-based visualization to communicate ideas, how to design and build models, and how to use ready-to-run models to foster critical thinking is the objective. A computational modeling approach to teaching is a research-proven pedagogy that predates computers. It attempts to enhance student achievement through the Modeling Cycle. The Modeling Cycle was pioneered by Robert Karplus and the SCIS Project in the 1960s and 1970s and later extended by the Modeling Instruction Program led by Jane Jackson and David Hestenes at Arizona State University. This talk describes a no-cost open-source computational approach aligned with a Modeling Cycle pedagogy. Our tools, curricular material, and ready-to-run examples are available from the Open Source Physics Collection of the National Science Foundation funded AAPT-ComPADRE digital library.
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References
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Acknowledgments
The OSP project is indebted to many people. Mario Belloni (Davidson College), Anne Cox (Eckerd College), Todd Timberlake (Berry College), Harvey Gould (Clark University), Jan Tobochnik (Kalamazoo College), and Loo Kang Wee (Singapore Ministry of Education) contribute curricular material. Douglas Brown (Cabrillo College) develops Tracker and Francisco Esquembre and García Clemente (University of Murcia) develop EJS. Bruce Mason (University of Oklahoma) and Lyle Barbato (AAPT) develop and maintain the ComPADRE NSDL.
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Christian, W. (2018). The Impact and Promise of Open-Source Computational Material for Physics Teaching. In: Sokołowska, D., Michelini, M. (eds) The Role of Laboratory Work in Improving Physics Teaching and Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96184-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96184-2_3
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