Resources

Important Resources

An Overview of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Guide

The EP3 guide provides steps for improving your physics curriculum, including a section on how to intentionally integrate computation into your program.

Read more »

PICUP Capstone Report

A short summary of the 2021 PICUP Virtual Capstone Conference Report, along with links to the report itself.

Read more »

Numerical Integration of Newton's Equation of Motion

Numerical integration methods from Appendix 3A of An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods 3rd Ed., by H. Gould, J. Tobochnik, and W. Christian (2007).

Read more »

Key Resources on Getting Started

This is a selection of recorded workshops on getting started with Jupyter, Ocatve/Matlab, spreadsheets, Glowscript, and p5.js.

Read more »

Why Should You Integrate Computation

"Contemporary research in physics and related sciences almost always involves the use of computers. [...] Computational physics has become a third way of doing physics and complements traditional modes of theoretical and experimental physics. [...] almost all undergraduate students who take physics courses will use computational tools in their future careers even if they do not become practicing p

Read more »

Practices

A Welcome to Let's Code Physics

March 17, 2021
by W. Brian Lane

The Let's Code Physics YouTube channel has many tutorials freely available for you to integrate into your physics course. Designed for physics courses of any level, these tutorials introduce physics concepts and computational methods together to help your students explore interesting problems that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

Read more »

Tags: python, intro classical, intro e&m, numerical methods, labs, tracker

Introducing Computation: A Laboratory Approach

November 4, 2020
by Kevin Adkins & Jennifer Birriel

Introductory physics lectures are generally short on time and finding time to integrate computation isn't trivial. One alternative is to move the computational exercises to the laboratory portion of the course and replace a few traditional labs with computational labs covering the same material. Here, we describe our computational laboratory implementation and present two complete exercises.

Read more »

Tags: labs, excel, arduino, intro e&m, intro classical, spreadsheets

Spreadsheet Computation in Introductory Physics Labs

July 24, 2020
by Jennifer Birriel & Ignacio Birriel

Integrating computation into first year physics courses can be a challenge, especially given the students' comfort with programming. One solution is to integrate spreadsheet computation in your labs for data reduction and analysis. You can  connect the language of computation with common spreadsheet terminology. Computation with spreadsheets is advantageous because Excel is widely available.

Read more »

Tags: excel, spreadsheets, intro classical

Capture, Code, Compare: Integrating computational modeling with video analysis

March 9, 2020
by W. Brian Lane

Capture, Code, Compare activities combine hand-on labs with computer modeling.  Students use video tracking to capture the motion of an object, code a model that reproduces the behavior of the physical system, then compare the quantitative results of the video analysis with the results from the computer model.  I'll go through an example of one of my activities in an introductory mechanics course.

Read more »

Tags: labs, tracker, intro classical

So You've Decided to Use Python - What's Next?

September 18, 2019
by Todd Zimmerman

Once you've made the choice to use Python as the programming language in your course, you still have a lot of decisions ahead of you.  I'll lay out the choices along with what I chose I why I chose it.

Read more »

Tags: python, glowscript, jupyter, trinket, vpython

View additional practices »