Mentor

Maria Rodriguez

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-26-2021

First Page

1

Last Page

10

Abstract

The computer-based curriculum for undergraduate physics students before 2019 struggled to stay current and applicable. When the course was created in the early 2000s, MathCad was used daily by many physicists. As computer’s and their computational abilities have grown exponentially, so have programming languages and applications. Now in the late 2010s/early 2020s, Excel, Python, and Mathematica are some of the most common computer appliques. To address this, we created toolkits to give undergraduate physicists the experience for future classes, careers, and graduate school. This paper focuses on the process for creating the Python toolkit and overall class setup. Run on Google Colabratory, no external programs need to be downloaded making the toolkit accessible to all with internet access. The toolkits the main points are: Functions, Loops, Downloading Data, etc. We based examples and problems on physics the students previously learned in their prerequisite classes (Snell’s law, star classification, kinematics). After employing the toolkit in PHYS 2500: Computer Methods at Utah State University for Fall 2019 and Fall 2020, student knowledge on coding, and coding physics, significantly improved and overall satisfactory of the course improved.

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