Chandralekha Singh & Enrique J. Galvez
Bryant University, Smithfield RI
The 2008 Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education, the fifth in this series of conferences, will focus on the expanding and deepening role of computers in physics research and instruction, with particular emphasis on undergraduate education. The purpose of this conference is to survey how computational physics is currently being used, to identify problems where computation helps students understand key physics concepts, and to assess the effectiveness of computational-physics instruction. The conference will highlight current efforts to incorporate computational physics and other computer-based methods (such as simulations and visualizations) into the physics classroom. The format of the conference—which will include invited plenary sessions, contributed poster presentations, and generous amounts of unscheduled time for informal discussions—is specially designed to promote dialogue and cross-fertilization of ideas between educators and researchers at the forefront of their fields, including researchers in physics education. College and university faculty, research associates (postdocs), computational-physics textbook authors, curriculum and educational software developers, and graduate and undergraduate students are invited to participate.
The GRC Physics Research and Education information on the Open Source Physics website mirrors and supplements material from the official GRC website related to the Computation and Computer-Based Instruction conference. Visit the official GRC site for official information about this and all other Gordon Research Conferences.
The 2008 Physics Research and Education Gordon Research Conference is supported in part by the American Association of Physics Teachers and by the Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society, the Open Source Physics project, Computers in Science and Engineering, and the Forum on Education of the American Physical Society.