Incorporating Simulations and Visualizations into Physics Instruction

Abstract

Last November I attended the education program of the Supercomputing 2005 convention in Seattle. I was in a team consisting of five high school teachers and three university professors. One part of the program dealt with the way science is being done in today's world. Gary Bertoline, associate vice president for visualization computing at Purdue University and chair of the education program for SC/05, presented the idea that science has now entered its third era and that teaching science should reflect this shift. The first era (Observation Era) brought us out of the Dark Ages as the first careful observations of the world were made, along with predictions based on those observations. The second era (Experimentation Era) came with the Industrial Revolution and the development of tools for making careful measurements, thus facilitating experimentation. More recently methods for gathering accurate data have improved, and tools for sophisticated analysis have become available. Now, making predictions based on models, simulations, and visualizations based on data has become the norm for scientists in this current era—the Era of Simulation. Incorporating instructional strategies that help develop models and applying those models to simulate or visualize concepts can and should be a part of the experience of physics students.