Bruce Mason – Open Source Physics. Modern Physics is done with computation no matter whether you are a theoretical or experimental. Our current classroom practice doesn’t allow with this well. A tri-partrate learning platform. Their project combines Open Source Physics, Easy Java Simulation, and the Compadre Library.
Modeling is important because it is what scientists do. It is also a valuable way to interest and help students learn. You can do problems that are too hard or impossible to visualize, that you just don’t see if you don’t have the computational resources. “The difference between physics and math is that I have fun demos. In physics as opposed to math. We do have answer. It is what I measured”. The Falling Slinky Model: What happens to the bottom when it begins to fall? Physically, it is hard to see. The bottom doesn’t know it has dropped until it gets a message from the top of the slinky. Colliding Galaxy model. There is no way for someone to do this on paper.
Adoptable, adaptable, and understandable. They have to be modular, adaptable, visual, interactive, internationalization, quality control, easy to get to, vetted by other teachers, descriptions of how it has been used. Francisco Esquembre – creator of Easy Java Simulations. He says the most important characteristics are adoptable, adaptable, and understandable. This gives power to the people. This was my theory and excitement in my dissertation study. Give the teachers the tools, and they will create. My findings can be summarized by the 90-9-1 rule. 1% of teachers have the time, interest, and skills to create. Of course more powerful tools make it more possible for people to participate.
He showed an Inferior Ptolemaic Model of what it would be like if the earth was the center of the earth and Venus went around the earth. How could you tell which model is right? People can conjecture and explore.
He showed the Falling Loop Model. A loop that is falling through a magnetic field. Faraday’s law. It creates a current that opposes the falling. Other physicists can open (download) the model and modify it with minimal programming. His students can do this as well. This is similar (but more advanced) to my work in the eNLVM that allows users to configure and serialize applets. They connect EJS to the library to make it easy for people to find, discuss, and share their models. Their library allows users to rate, collect, relate, comment, sort, annotate, and share. Again, the themes of our Mellon work and the ODLMS shows its head. One of the contributors to Open Source Physics has written a text book for which their File Cabinet contains the resources aligned with the sections of the text book. They have build into EJS the ability to browse repositories of EJS models. There is a professor in Taiwan who has over EJS 150 models. Doug Brown, Wolfgang, and Lyle Barbato are some of the key people. A project called Tracker that generates video from EJS simulations. They have also done a Data Tool.
Their stats (Open Source Physics?) are 350 resources, 1700 users per week, 31,000 downloads per month. By comparison, the NLVM has about 110 applets and gets 40,000 users per day.
Posted on November 18th, 2009 by joel
Filed under: conferences
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