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The ability to develop, use, and refine models of experimental systems is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. However, no assessments of students' model-based reasoning exist for upper-division…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly…
Traditional foundation models are pre-trained on broad datasets to reduce the training resources (e.g., time, energy, labeled samples) needed for fine-tuning a wide range of downstream tasks. However, traditional foundation models struggle…
Physics-informed neural network (PINN) has recently gained increasing interest in computational mechanics. In this work, we present a detailed introduction to programming PINN-based computational solid mechanics. Besides, two prevailingly…
Science communication skills are considered essential learning objectives for undergraduate physics students. However, high enrollment and limited class resources present significant barriers to providing students ample opportunities to…
Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
We analyze the curriculum of the early common-years of engineering in our institute using tools of statistical physics of complex networks. Naturally, a course programme is structured in a networked form (temporal dependency and…
Expert judgment for software effort estimation is oriented toward direct evidences that refer to actual effort of similar projects or activities through experts' experiences. However, the availability of direct evidences implies the…
Homework in introductory physics represents an important part of a student's learning experience; therefore choosing the manner in which homework is presented merits investigation. We performed three rounds of clinical trials comparing the…
An approach for engineering student exercises using the Internet is described. In this approach, for a given exercise, each student receives the same problem, but with different data. The exercise content can be static or dynamic, and the…
We review and extend existing frameworks on modeling to develop a new framework that describes model-based reasoning in upper-division physics labs. Constructing and using models are core scientific practices that have gained significant…
Computational physics increasingly depends on large simulation datasets generated by software that remains under active development for many years. In such settings, reproducibility requires not only well documented data but also explicit…
This chapter narrates the journey of developing and integrating computing into the physics curriculum through three consecutive courses, each tailored to the learners' level. It starts with the entry-level "Physics Playground in Python" for…
The need for highly qualified physics teachers in the U.S. is well established, and reform efforts are underway to develop novel and innovative teacher professional development experiences to improve the quality of K-12 physics education.…
A strategy is suggested for teaching mathematically literate students, with no background in physics, just enough quantum mechanics for them to understand and develop algorithms in quantum computation and quantum information theory.…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
This article describes the successful revitalization of an undergraduate physics program. The areas of curriculum development, undergraduate research experiences and advising and retention, to name a few, are emphasized in this…
Recently, user-centered methods have been proposed to improve the design of programming languages. In order to explore what benefits these methods might have for novice programming language designers, we taught a collection of user-centered…
We describe a way to introduce physics high school students with no background in programming to computational problem-solving experiences. Our approach builds on the great strides made by the Modeling Instruction reform curriculum. This…