Role of Simulations in Optics Education

摘要

Simulations can play an important role in science education. Simulations (enabled by powerful numerical and visualization methods) are excellent tools for teaching optical phenomena. The advantages of using simulations as a tool for teaching optics include, amongst others, (1) giving students an engaging, hands-on active learning experience, (2) helping in understanding equations as physical relationships among experimental measurements and (3) allowing students to investigate phenomena that would not be possible to experiment on in a laboratory or classroom setting. We illustrate the utility of simulations in optics by describing some examples from geometric and physical optics using the open source programming language Python.