Augmenting TPT papers with computer simulations

摘要

With the September issue of The Physics Teacher we begin a one-year experiment to supplement TPT papers with computer models from the Open Source Physics (OSP) Collection from the ComPADRE National Science Digital Library.' Although there are many well-organized websites and CDs of computer simulations that support text books, simulations associated with journal articles are harder to find and may be hard to use and adapt. Even if the author of a paper submits a program to an online archive or posts a simulation or source code on a personal web page, the disparate operating systems, programming styles, programming languages, and user interfaces may make it difficult for users to explore and modify the simulation. We work to address these problems through a tripartite integration of the ComPADRE NSDL with: 1) a large collection of ready-to-use Java simulations for physics and astronomy teaching,2) the Easy Java Simulations (EJS) tool to create new models and adapt existing models, and 3) the OSP code library and computational physics textbook to provide technical detail.2