Independently as Juniors and Seniors
Department of Physics, Lawrence University, Box 599, Appleton, WI 54911-5626
Voice: 920-832-6721; FAX: 920-832-6962; Email: david.m.cook@lawrence.edu
Text of Talk Delivered at the Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers
San Diego, CA
8 January 2001
Most efforts using computers in physics programs focus on introductory courses or individual upper-level courses. In contrast, for a dozen years the Lawrence Department of Physics has been orienting sophomores to the use of general purpose graphical, symbolic, and numeric computational tools so that they will be able to use these resources on their own initiative in all their subsequent studies. With support from NSF CCLI-EMD grant DUE-9952285, the author is now six months into a two-year project whose main objective is to recast numerous locally written materials into a publication that can be easily customized for use with a variety of hardware and software. The grant also supports faculty workshops to be held at Lawrence University in the summers of 2001 and 2002 and modest beta testing in 2001-02. Current information about this project can be found from a link at www.lawrence.edu/dept/physics.
Many of you probably know that, for a dozen years or more, we at Lawrence University have been developing the computational dimensions of our upper-level curriculum. We have built a computational laboratory that makes a wide spectrum of hardware and software available to students and, concurrently, we have developed numerous documents introducing computational tools and describing prototypical applications. We have also developed an approach to introducing students to these resources and drafted several hundred pages of instructional materials to support that approach. Currently, I am on sabbatical. With support from the NSF-CCLI grant referenced in the abstract, I have embarked on a project whose main objective is the creation of an adaptable publication that I, the NSF, and Brooks-Cole (the publisher) all hope will be useful at other places seeking to increase the computational components of their curricula. In addition, to address both dissemination and assessment, the grant supports the holding at Lawrence of one faculty workshop in the coming summer, two faculty workshops in the summer of 2002, and modest beta testing of the materials in the 2001-2002 academic year. Today's talk expands on and updates what I said in a talk some of you may have heard last summer in Guelph. I want to
As I see it, the primary tasks of those parts of an undergraduate physics program that focus on physics majors are, first, to awaken in our students a full realization of the beauty, breadth, and power of our discipline and, second, though not by much, to help them develop not only a secure understanding of fundamental concepts but also the skills to use a variety of tools in applying those concepts. Among the tools, I would firmly include the ability to use computational resources of several sorts.
In the broadest of terms, we should---I argue---be structuring our curricula so that, ultimately, students will recognize when a computational approach may have merit and will have the personal confidence to pursue that approach on their own initiative.
I think that the best way for me to communicate the structure of the Lawrence curriculum vis a vis computation is to track the computational experience of an entering freshman physics major as she moves towards graduation four years later. Our calendar is a three-term calendar, and full-time students take three courses at a time, each of which receives 1 Lawrence course credit, which---by the official rule anyway---translates to 3-1/3 semester hours.
Prospective physics majors at Lawrence first encounter computational approaches in the introductory courses. Our laboratory is equipped with Macintosh computers, Vernier ULI cards, and a variety of sensors. Beyond LoggerPro (for data acquisition), students have access both in the laboratory and elsewhere on campus to Excel (for data analysis) and Kaleidagraph (for visualization). Exercises assigned in the laboratory routinely involve automated data acquisition, statistical analysis and curve fitting, and exercises assigned in lectures occasionally send students to the laboratory computers for graphing results or pursuing numerical solutions to Newton's laws with editable Excel templates. By the end of the freshman year, prospective majors have already developed some skills in the use of computational tools for physics, particularly skills of value in the laboratory.
Beyond the freshman year, students---of course---continue to use Excel and Kaleidagraph, but they also as sophomores have access to our Computational Physics Laboratory (CPL), which is equipped with six SGI UNIX workstations, monochrome and color printers, and software in all the categories I have already enumerated. Each student has an account in this departmental facility, and each is entitled to a key both to the CPL and to the building, so each has 24/7 access to the CPL.
To help sophomores become confident, regular users of the resources of the CPL, we offer a course called Computational Tools in Physics, to which---since it is the central focus of this talk---I will return in a moment. Even those sophomores who don't elect this course, however, encounter two short computational workshops---one on IDL and the other on MACSYMA---in our required sophomore mechanics course (Barger and Olsson) and a couple of computer-based exercises in our required sophomore electricity and magnetism course (Griffiths). Thus, all sophomores have at least a small, forced exposure to the CPL, and some---but unfortunately not all---sophomores have a fully comprehensive introduction to the available capabilities.
Subsequent theoretical and experimental courses alike offer students many opportunities to continue honing their computational skills and, depending on the instructor, some of these courses will direct students explicitly to the CPL for an occasional exercise. Most senior capstone projects will use the resources of the CPL and some, notably projects in fluid mechanics, musical acoustics, xray diffraction, multiphoton quantum transitions and chaotic dynamics, make extensive use of these facilities. Some physics students use the CPL in conjunction with courses in other departments, particularly mathematics.
Let me return now to the elective course Computational Tools in Physics, which is the starting point in our nurturing of our students' abilities to take full advantage of the resources of the CPL. This full-credit course is offered in three 1/3-credit segments, one in each of the three terms of our academic year. Its topics are coordinated with the sequence of required courses taken by sophomore physics majors. The first term covers
The second term is coordinated with an intermediate course in classical mechanics, for which Barger and Olsson is the current text, and focuses on symbolic and numerical approaches to ordinary differential equations. In the first half of the term it covers
The third term is coordinated with an intermediate course in electricity and magnetism, for which Griffiths is the current text, and focuses on symbolic and numerical integration. In the first six weeks of the term, it covers
The Lawrence approach to nurturing the abilities of students to use computational resources
Our approach is active; it compels students to play a personal role in their own learning; it forces students to defend their solutions in writing; it gives students practice in preparing and delivering oral presentations; it encourages students to work in groups; it permeates our curriculum; and, more than any other objective, it develops the students' abilities to operate in this arena on their own initiative.
The grant referenced in the abstract and received last February from the Educational Materials Development track of the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement program (CCLI-EMD) of the NSF provides support for converting the experience acquired and the extensive library of instructional materials developed at Lawrence into a flexible publication as a resource for other institutions. That we don't all use the same spectrum of hardware and software, however, poses a major challenge. The variety of options and combinations is so great that any single choice (or coordinated set of choices) is bound to limit the usefulness of the end result to a small subset of all potentially interested users. My effort to address that challenge involves assembling different incarnations of the basic materials from a wide assortment of components, some of which---the generic components---will be included in all incarnations and others of which---those specific to particular software packages---will be included only if the potential user requests them. I intend that the specific software and hardware treated in any particular incarnation will be microscopically "tailor-able" to the spectrum of resources available at the instructor's site. One incarnation, for example may include the generic components and the components that discuss IDL, MAPLE, C, and LaTeX while another may include the generic components and the components that focus on MATLAB, MATHEMATICA, and FORTRAN (including Numerical Recipes). Whatever components are included, chapters and pages will be numbered sequentially from the beginning without gaps, and the table of contents and index will contain information about only those components that were actually included.
I hope now to convey some of my present conception of what the final product will look like. Here, with the broadest brush, is my present tentative table of contents:
While the objective is for students to become fluent in the use of a spectrum of computational tools---and the chapters are organized by program or by computational technique involved, the focus throughout is on physical contexts.
To illustrate representative chapters, I have chosen here to describe Chapters 2 and 8 more fully. Chapter 2 {\bf [OHD]} represents chapters that introduce basic features of an application program, specifically a program for processing arrays of numbers and creating graphical visualizations of one-, two-, and three-dimensional data sets. The sections of the chapter dealing with MATLAB are tentatively titled
The structure of Chapter 8 on evaluating integrals exemplifies the structure of all of the chapters on various computational techniques. Presumably, before approaching any particular section in this chapter, the student would have studied the relevant sections in earlier chapters. Tentatively, the sections in Chapter 8 are titled
The first section, whose detail we will look at in a moment, sets several physical problems, the successful addressing of which benefits from exploitation of a computational tool. The second section describes how one might use a symbolic tool in application to some of the problems set in the first section. Save for the last, the remaining sections describe suitable numerical algorithms generically and then illustrate how those algorithms can be invoked in a variety of ways. The final section lays out several exercises that students can use to hone their skills. Sections 8.1 (sample problems), 8.3 (numerical algorithms), and 8.7 (exercises) would be included in all versions of the chapter; each individual instructor would select only those other sections that are appropriate to that instructor's site.
Let us step down one further level in the envisioned structure. Here is the present list of sample problems for Chapter 8:
They range over several subareas of physics and reveal that evaluation of integrals, perhaps as functions of one or more parameters, plays an important role in many areas of physics.
Even among sites that use the same spectrum of hardware and software, however, some aspects of local environments are still unique to individual sites. Rules of citizenship, user responsibilities, practices and policies regarding accounts and passwords, the features and elementary resources of the operating system, the structuring of public directories, backup schedules, after-hours access, licensing restrictions in force on proprietary software, and numerous other aspects are subject to considerable local variation. This book makes no attempt to constrain local options in these matters. Throughout the book, individual users are directed to a publication called the Local Guide for site-specific particulars. A suggested template for that guide, specifically the one used at Lawrence, will be included in the supplementary materials available to each user, but it will require editing to reflect local practices.
Finally, let me speak briefly about how I think I can achieve the necessary flexibility in publishing so individual users can select from a spectrum of components that speak particularly to their specific hardware and software. Beyond doing a superb job of formatting complex equations, tables, arrays, and text, the package LaTeX is able to create tables of contents and indices automatically. One of the available packages (the ifthen package), when invoked, adds a capability to include or exclude different files depending on whether a controlling Boolean variable has the value `true' or `false'. Thus, one
\documentclass{book}
Input ifthen package
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\ifthenelse{\boolean{IDL}} {\input{\head/IDL/IDL.tex} {}
\printindex
Set flags, e.g., IDL, to true or false
\end{document}
Here, we display the parts of the LaTeX code that effect in particular the conditional input of modules and the making of the table of contents and index. Early on, we must input the requisite packages to define commands for conditional execution and for constructing the index, and we must set a dozen or so flags, e.g., IDL, to true or false to specify which modules are to be included. Then, in the main body of the processing, we request the table of contents, input all possible modules (with each input statement surrounded by a conditional controlled by the flag set earlier), and request the printing of the index. Note that the flag IDL, for example, not only controls whether the IDL chapter is included but also, internal to many other chapters, controls whether the IDL discussions of representative problems will be included. Once the flags are set as desired, we simply process this file as described in the previous transparency, and the job is done. Clearly, such flexibility would be impossible were we not able to exploit features of LaTeX, including the particular capabilities of the ifthen and makeidx packages and the auxiliary program makeindex to format the PostScript files that subsequently can be printed to obtain each incarnation.
Brooks-Cole is committed to participating in the process of refining this essential procedure so as to be able to make a commercially feasible product. Their editors claim that they will be able to produce the desired customization economically for orders of as few as ten copies. Further, once the structure has been fully worked out and debugged, there is no reason at all why other authors might not contribute components, so---over time---the product will expand to accommodate a wider and wider spectrum of hardware and software and maybe even to include broad topics not originally in the plan.
More detailed information about this summer's workshop, including an on-line application form for participation, is available at the URL
Beyond the workshops this summer and next, my grant supports a modest amount of beta testing during the 2001-2002 academic year. Because of the flexibility of the materials and the variety of contexts in which the materials might be used, testing may occur in formal courses or in informal contexts of self- or minimally guided- study. Further, any single beta-test site will almost surely be in a position to test only portions of the developing materials.
This project is still very much a work in progress, and I have no conclusions to report at this moment. By the completion of the first phase of this project a year from now in December, 2001, I will have devoted full time for the equivalent of one academic year and two summers to the writing and one faculty workshop will have been completed. In the period from January, 2001, to June, 2002, I will be back teaching full time but will also be devoting time to polishing drafts and responding to comments and criticisms from beta testers. In the summer of 2002, I will conduct two more faculty workshops and finish the polishing. The target is to deliver the LaTeX source files for all of the modules and for representive solutions to the exercises to Brooks-Cole by September, 2002, for a January, 2003, publication date. Absent genuine conclusions, let me simply stop by inviting you to