Abstract
This article describes a curricular innovation designed to help students experience authentic physics inquiry with an emphasis on computational modeling and scientific communication. The educational design centers on a new type of assignment called a computational essay, which was developed and implemented over the course of two semesters of an intermediate electricity and magnetism course at the University of Oslo, Norway. We describe the motivation, learning goals, and scaffolds used in the computational essay project, with the intention that other educators will be able to replicate and adapt our design. We also report on initial findings from this implementation, including key features of student-written computational essays, student reflections on the inquiry process, and self-reported conceptual and attitudinal development. Based on these findings, we argue that computational essays can serve a key role in introducing students to open-ended, inquiry-based work and setting the foundation for future computational research and studies.
Highlights
The way we teach physics often bears little resemblance to the way we do physics
We report on initial findings from this implementation, including key features of student-written computational essays, student reflections on the inquiry process, and self-reported conceptual and attitudinal development
Because the students were constrained in the amount of time they were expected to put in, and because many students were less-than-comfortable with programming, the physics covered in the course, or both, we provided the students with a number of pre-made simulations that were intended to act as ‘seeds’ for the students to build out into fully-fledged computational essays
Summary
The way we teach physics often bears little resemblance to the way we do physics. Classical physics education tends to focus on the twin pillars of theory and experiment. There is much more to physics than just theory and experiment; in recent decades, for example, computation has been added as a ‘3rd pillar’ of physics [1, 2]. Despite this development, many physics departments have been slow to bring computation into their educational programs [3, 4]. Standard physics courses include few opportunities to practice this kind of communication, refinement, or community engagement, except in limited circumstances such as innovative laboratory courses [5]
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