Simulations, Modelling and the Teaching of Physics in School -- the Open Source Physics Project. (December 31, 2011)

 Wolfgang Christian, Francisco Esquembre and Lyle Barbato from Davidson College, North Carolina; the Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad de Murcia,  Murcia, Spain and the American Association of Physics Teachers, College Park, Maryland respectively describe in the November 25, 2011 issue of Science the development of the Open Source Physics (OSP) project which is support by the US National Science Foundation and is a winner of The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) established to encourage innovation and excellence in education, as well as to encourage the use of high-quality on-line resources by students, teachers, and the public.

OSP according to the authors: "seeks to enhance computational physics education by providing a central Web site containing computer modeling tools, simulations, curricular resources such as lesson plans, and a computational physics textbook that explains the pedagogic simulations' algorithms," and in their view, "Students at all levels will benefit from these interactive simulations by learning to question and assess the simulation's assumptions and output."

It is their contention that "novice students tend to reach first for an equation to apply rather than trying to understand the underlying physics concepts [however] in well-designed simulations, physical quantities, such as force or field strength, are not given. Instead, they must be determined by running and observing the outcome and by interacting with the simulation to make measurements... [Furthermore] our simulations also use multiple representations to depict information, as students learn best when they see ideas presented in different ways, for example, as time-based graphs and tables".

Next, to ease students into the design and development of computer models the necessity for learning programming languages and dealing with the compiling and linking to graphics and numeric libraries is addressed though the development by OSP of "a number of free modeling, authoring, and analysis tools".

The authors state that currently the OSP website holds some "400 primary materials" together with numerous "support documents", and to demonstate the utility of the website: "During March 2011, we served 10,000+ visitors with 5000 simulations, an increase of 32% over March 2010 traffic".

In their write-up, Christian, Esquembre and Barbato stress: "Designing and building models that intrigue and educate without overwhelming has been challenging. We have learned that a simple set of buttons to start, stop, and reset a simulation followed by a small number of editable parameters... helps to guide inquiry. Additionally, we learned that “freely available on the Internet” is not enough. The process of establishing and cultivating an active international community that shares new simulations takes an ongoing commitment... Thus, we give a number of workshops (see the second photo) every year for novice and expert modelers alike. These workshops help faculty to form and refine the skills needed to create simulations and implement modeling in their classrooms. For those unable to attend, we offer online video tutorials to help develop computational modeling skills".

And finally, they make the point: "Paraphrasing Richard Feynman, we have learned that if we cannot reduce a model to an algorithm, we do not completely understand it."