Related papers: Physicality, Modeling and Making in a Computationa…
Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and…
Throughout life, we might seek a calling, companions, skills, entertainment, truth, self-knowledge, beauty, and edification. The practice of curiosity can be viewed as an extended and open-ended search for valuable information with hidden…
Programming is deeply embedded in contemporary mathematical practice, yet its epistemic status in university mathematics teaching remains contested. Little is known about how mathematicians themselves understand the legitimacy of…
We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education…
The paper describes a curricular framework for introducing microcontroller programming in the University Physics lab. The approach makes use of Modeling Instruction, an effective approach for teaching science at the secondary level in which…
Modeling complex physical dynamics is a fundamental task in science and engineering. Traditional physics-based models are sample efficient, and interpretable but often rely on rigid assumptions. Furthermore, direct numerical approximation…
There has been an increased focus on the integration of practices into physics curricula, with a particular emphasis on integrating computation into the undergraduate curriculum of scientists and engineers. In this paper, we present a…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
Implementing a laboratory activity involves a complex interplay among learning goals, available resources, feedback about the existing course, best practices for teaching, and an overall philosophy about teaching labs. Building on our…
Background: Software modelling is a creative yet challenging task. Modellers often find themselves lost in the process, from understanding the modelling problem to solving it with proper modelling strategies and modelling tools. Students…
Computational thinking is a key skill for space science graduates, who must apply advanced problem-solving skills to model complex systems, analyse big data sets, and develop control software for mission-critical space systems. We describe…
This paper reviews connections between physics and computation, and explores their implications. The main topics are computational "hardness" of physical systems, computational status of fundamental theories, quantum computation, and the…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. When students encounter discrepancies between the actual and expected behavior of a system, they revise their models to include the newly…
Instruction in quantum mechanics is becoming increasingly important as the field is not only a key part of modern physics research, but is also important for emerging technologies. However, many students regard quantum mechanics as a…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
In this chapter, we argue for an epistemological shift from viewing coding and computational thinking as mastery over computational logic and symbolic forms, to viewing them as a more complex form of experience. Rather than viewing…
The paper describes two general problems encountered in computational assignments at the introductory level. First, novice students often treat computer code as almost magic incantations, and like novices in many fields, have trouble…
The classical simulation of physical processes using standard models of computation is fraught with problems. On the other hand, attempts at modelling real-world computation with the aim of isolating its hypercomputational content have…
This paper summarizes some challenges encountered and best practices established in several years of teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences at the undergraduate and graduate level. I discuss motivations for teaching ML to…
The chapter supports educators and postgraduate students in understanding the role of simulation in software engineering research based on the authors' experience. This way, it includes a background positioning simulation-based studies in…