Portal for Preparatory Documents

PICUP: The Partnership for Integrating Computing into Undergraduate Physics

Last updated: April 25, 2007 11:25 AM
     

  1. Integrative Computing Education and Research (ICER)
    Final Report of the Northwest Regional Meeting

    This is the report from a "visioning" conference held as part of a large, NSF-sponsored project for computer science education reform. In effect it is analogous to the "white paper" that is our workshop's ultimate goal. Have no illlusions ... this ICER project is one or two orders of magnitude larger than ours. When I met with Eric Roberts - one its principal architects - at the AAAS meeting in February, I got the impression that it was substantial and that these conferences were being replicated. I am would like you to consider the ICER conference schedule and the type of information they develop in their report in contrast to what we are planning to do in our WORKshop and produce at its end. The contrasts between our approach and theirs (e.g. we are programming twice the amount of working groups' time) are intriguing and I believe will help guide us to create a quite different model for driving and supporting curricular reform.


  2. The Early Careers of Physics Bachelors

    AIP Pub. Number R-433

    This report contains data comparing the work demands of this cohort to the educational preparation they received as undergraduate physics majors. These data suggest a significant discrepancy between what they are asked to do at work and what they were prepared to do by their physics education. The information in this report is one of the primary drivers behind the process leading to our workshop.


  3. Physics Bachelors with Master’s Degrees

    AIP Pub. Number R-433.02

    This report indicates the wide range of fields in which physics bachelors get masters degrees. A majority do not go on in physics - engineering and computer science together equal the number staying with physics @ 40% - and 20% are distributed in many other areas. The employment responsibilities of this cohort show increasing demand to "computer programming" work as compared with the bachelors only cohort.


  4. High Performance Computing In Physics Education

    This is an abstract submitted to the TeraGrid 2007 conference on high performance scientific computing by some members of the partnership. This lays out a context for some educational objectives of integrating computing into physics education.


  5. A Guidebook for the Creation of Computational Science Modules

    These are typical sample guidelines for module development producted by Capital University as part of its project for developing computational science across the curriculum.


  6. The Finite Difference Time Domain method for solving Maxwell's Equations

    This is a compact description of the FDTD method for solving Maxwell's equations for time-dependent electromagnetic fields, including its advantages and limitations.

  7. An Excel Spreadsheet Implementation of the FDTD method for solving Maxwell's Equations

    This fairly recent paper describes how to implement the FDTD method in a spreadsheet, thus making it suitable for use in introductory courses.

  8. Keck Undergraduate Computational Science Education Consortium

    Capital University is the lead institution of a collaborative project supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation. The project consisted of a ten-school consortium to develop and implement educational materials for an undergraduate curriculum in computational science. This links to the consortium Web site containing all of the modules. However, documents from two examples are in the following two references.

  9. ABLATION, AEROBRAKING AND AIRBURSTING OF A HYPERSONIC PROJECTILE IN EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE

    PAUL J. THOMAS, MARC GOULET, ANDREW T. PHILLIPS, ALEX SMITH
    Departments of Math, Computer Science, and Physics
    University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
    This is one of the modules created under the auspices of the Keck Undergraduate Computational Science Education Consortium. It is intended as a stand-alone component of a second, project-based course in computational science. The students should have two semesters of calculus and interest in physics, astronomy or geology. It assumes some proficiency with the symbolic and programming capabilities of Maple, as might be taught in a first course in computational science. The module is implemented in its entirety using Maple.

  10. COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF ORBITAL MOTION
    IN GENERAL RELATIVITY AND NEWTONIAN
    PHYSICS

    MARC GOULET, ALEX SMITH, PAUL J. THOMAS, BRANDON BARRETTE
    Departments of Math, Computer Science, and Physics
    University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
    This is another of the modules created under the auspices of the Keck Undergraduate Computational Science Education Consortium. It is intended as a stand-alone component of a second, project-based course in computational science. The module is implemented in its entirety using Maple.