Helping Students Discover The Future: the Physics Careers Resource Website

written by Crystal Bailey

Written by Dr. Crystal Bailey the Education and Careers Program Manager at the American Physical Society  in College Park, MD. This article from the APS Summer 2011 Forum on Education newsletter discusses the biggest challenges physics educators face today. In spite of the fact that only a tiny fraction of physics bachelors can reasonably expect to become physics faculty, students consistently name this career path as the "typical" track for physicists.  Therefore a reliable, accurate source of information about physics careers is essential, in order to give students a clear picture of what's possible after graduation, and beyond. Bailey discusses the way that the comPADRE Career Website does this.

http://www.aps.org/units/fed/newsletters/summer2011/bailey.cfm

OSP Tools and the ComPADRE OSP Collection

written by Wolfgang Christian, Doug Brown, and Francisco Esquembre

This paper outlines the pedagogical and technical features of the Open Source Physics (OSP) project and how we use OSP-based tools and resources to introduce modeling into the curriculum.  We describe our current effort to create and distribute new material using the Easy Java Simulations and Tracker tools and how we distribute this curricular material with ComPADRE National Science Digital Library [OSP 2009]. The paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the Modeling Cycle that is the basis for our pedagogy.  Section III describes basic Easy Java Simulations concepts and section IV describes Tracker.  The main features of ComPADRE are presented in section V and section VI presents the pedagogical benefits of this connection. Finally, section VII summarizes the improvements obtained by the use of our approach.

http://www.aps.org/units/fed/newsletters/summer2011/osp.cfm