The purpose of this conference is to identify problems where computation helps students understand key physics concepts. Participants are university and college faculty interested in integrating computation at their home institutions. Some participants already teach or have taught computational physics to undergraduates and some are looking for ways to integrate computational physics into their existing physics curriculum. Participants will contribute and discuss algorithms and curricular material for teaching core subjects such as mechanics, electricity and magnetism, quantum mechanics, and statistical and thermal physics. Participants will prepare and edit their material for posting on an AAPT website such as ComPADRE. Visiting experts will give talks on how computational physics may be used to present key concepts and current research to undergraduates. Participants are invited to prepare a poster describing how they incorporate computational physics into their teaching, what projects they have assigned to students at different levels, and how computation has enhanced their curriculum. Posters will remain up throughout the conference.
Invited speakers include Amy Bug (Swarthmore College), Norman Chonacky (CISE editor), Francisco Esquembre ( University of Murcia, Spain), Robert Swendsen (Carnegie-Mellon University) , Steven Gottlieb (Indiana University), Rubin Landau (Oregon State University), Julien C. Sprott (University of Wisconsin), Angela Shiflet (Wofford College), and Laurie Heyer (Davidson College).
The organizing committee consists of Wolfgang Christian, Jan Tobochnik, Rubin Landau, and Robert Hilborn.
This conference is sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and Computing in Science and Engineering (CISE). Partial funding for this conference is being provided by Davidson College, Computing in Science and Engineering, the Shodor Foundation, the TeraGrid project, and NSF grant DUE- 442581.