Physicality, modeling, and agency in a computational physics class

Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists’ careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover, has tended to be constructed narrowly as a route to solving physics problems. Here, we broaden Physics Education Research’s conception of computation by constructing a metamodel—a model of modeling—incorporating insights on computational modeling from the philosophy of science and prior work. The metamodel is formulated in terms of practices, things physicists do, and how these inform one another. We operationalize this metamodel in an educational environment that incorporates making, the creation of shared physical and digital artifacts, intended to promote students’ agency, creativity, and self-expression alongside doing physics. We present a content analysis of student work from initial implementations of this approach to illustrate the very complex epistemic maneuvers students make as they engaged in computational modeling. We demonstrate how our metamodel can be used to understand student practices and conclude with implications of the metamodel for instruction and future research.

Figure 1

Prior metamodel of knowledge production in computational physics [14]. Arrows denote how the results of certain practices are used by a scientist to facilitate others.

Figure 2

Revised metamodel of knowledge production in computational physics including the following five components: In a scientific inquiry, a scientist undertakes a cycle of production and critique practices to meet their objectives. In doing so, they use resources. The outcome of a successful inquiry is scientific products that become resources for future inquiries. Illustrative examples of each component are shown as disks. Arrows depict how elements of the metamodel inform or are used by one another in an inquiry.

Figure 3

A selection of making materials provided to the students. Materials are selected to provide a wide variety of properties, each be usable in more than one way, and to avoid obviously resembling lab items such as springs, masses.

Figure 4

Half-pipe group. (a) Initial idea, (b) second iteration, (c) final production iteration of the oscillator, (d) ramp profile fit to polynomial functions [notebook], (e) table of extracted energy dissipation coefficients [report], (f) Fits of model to experimental data for different rollers and ramps [report]. Note that text size has been increased for legibility purposes, however subfigure captions are verbatim what the students wrote. The red dashed line has been added to illustrate our interpretation of what the group refers to as an “envelope.”.

Figure 5

Iron bar group. (a) Snapshot of oscillator; the bob is a magnet and the iron bar is held onto a wooden frame with tape. (b) Student-generated cartoon depicting oscillator configuration at different points in the motion; note tilted magnetic bob at base [report]. (c) Visualization showing maxima and minima detected by their algorithm [notebook]. (d) Division of time into “quarter periods” [notebook]. (e) Length of quarter periods as a function of time for motion toward and away from the iron bar (“in” and “out”) [report]. (f) Final fitted data [report]. Note that text size has been increased for legibility purposes, however, subfigure captions are verbatim what the students wrote.

Figure 6

Torsion group. (a) Sketch of the torsional oscillator. (b) Snapshots from a submitted movie of the oscillator rotating. (c) Visualization of the position of two tracked points as a function of time. Note text in red was added here to aid clarity. (d) Angular displacement $\theta (t)$ as initially reconstructed. (e) Intermediate plot displaying where their algorithm identified discontinuities. (f) Final continuous angular displacement function. (g) Numerical, analytical, and experimental data. (h) Plots of the discrepancies: numerical-experimental and analytical-experimental.

Figure 7

Students’ intermediate visualizations of experimental and simulated trajectories from the half-pipe group’s report. Legend position on 7 is from the student work. The text behind the semitransparent legend reads “Dowel (x, y) coordinates over time on steep ramp”.