Over the past dozen years Davidson College has produced some of the most widely used interactive curricular materials for the teaching of introductory and advanced physics courses. These materials are based on Java applets called Physlets and the new Open Source Physics (OSP) programs and applications. We will focus on three distinct areas: teaching introductory physics with Physlet-based materials, modeling in intermediate classical mechanics with Easy Java Simulations (Ejs), and teaching advanced courses (quantum mechanics and general relativity) with OSP-based materials. Participants are encouraged to bring laptops with a CD drive to the breakout sessions for hands-on explorations of Physlets, Ejs and OSP.
This workshop is supported in part by NSF DUE-0442581.
As students develop mathematical models to describe motion, they can further explore and test their models by building a computer simulation as well. Although this is the ideal, most instructors choose not do this with their students because it either requires a computer programming class for the instructor and students to do the programming or students simply take a program that is already written and don't input the physics. This workshop gives two possible solutions that lower the barrier for building computer models: 1) building models within a video-analysis program, using a program called Tracker and 2) building simulations with Easy Java Simulations, Ejs, a free and open source tool for creating Java simulations. Both of these programs encourage the user (student or instructor) to focus on the physics instead of the technical aspects of programming and building simulations. This workshop will show you how to use these materials and provide materials that can be easily adapted to a range of physical phenomena.
This workshop is supported in part by NSF DUE-0442581.
This workshop presents recently developed computer-based curricular material that helps to improve the understanding of statistical and thermal physics concepts and that makes many inaccessible topics accessible to students. Participants will receive a CD containing curricular material from the Statistical and Thermal Physics (STP) project as well as a collection of ready to run Java programs from the Open Source Physics (OSP) project. All programs are feely distributable under the GNU GPL license.
This workshop will benefit anyone teaching statistical and thermal physics as well as computational physicists wishing to adopt the OSP Java libraries for
their own teaching and research. We will discuss the general pedagogical and technical issues in the design of interactive computer-based tutorials as well as
how OSP programs can be adapted to your local institution. Information can be obtained from <http:// www.opensourcephysics.org/>.
Partial funding for this work was obtained through NSF grant DUE-0442581.