Coding Integration into High School Physics & Physical Science using STEMcoding Project Resources

 

Specific Goals/Rationale

The goal of this particular course is to show teachers how computer programming exercises can be integrated into high school physics (AP or non-AP) and high school physical science in a simple, fun and engaging way. For a variety of reasons, this course is not intended to take the place of "modeling instruction" workshops by the American Modeling Teachers Association (AMTA) in any way.

The basis of this course is a set of computer programming exercises that Prof. Orban developed (at least initially) for freshman physics courses on OSU's Marion campus. Over a thousand college and high school students, many of whom have never written a computer program before, have successfully completed these exercises. As discussed in Orban et al. 2018 (https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.5058449) surveys of students at OSU Marion seem to indicate that the content is at an appropriate diculty level, even for absolute beginner programmers.

What programming language is involved?

The activities in this course involve modifying and running javascript programs. For people with experience working with C, C++ or Java code, this language will seem very familiar. We do not currently use python or vpython in our activities. Python uses indentation instead of curly brackets to de ne the logic of the program, which means that just adding a space to the code in the wrong place could change the behavior of the program and lead to confusion. (However, many people argue that the role of indentation in python helps students avoid writing sloppy looking code.) We may set up a python version of our activities in the future if there is interest.