The aim is to get students to create visualisations to understand interesting and complex concepts and learn coding through this process. This teaching activity combines two things: the ability to teach programming and apply it to the discipline area of physics.
People have been trying to teach programming for a long time but there is always a huge barrier to entry. Either students don’t want to engage with it or afraid of doing something wrong or don’t see the benefit of it.
The idea that we had for second year students is to showcase physics as well as teaching coding skills. Our goal was to get students interested in programming and to see the power of what you can do. Coding is fundamentally providing a way to do repetitive tasks with varied inputs. We wanted to bring to light the physics knowledge, background maths and to give them the ‘why’ in the work. We hoped that this would lead to a deeper understanding of the physics that they are studying.
My role was to design the exercises. Break it down and scaffold it, ready for the students to use. The thing I’m most proud of is the really cool outputs from the students and their willingness to struggle with weird code to achieve these outputs.
 | Use Mathematica. We conduct fortnightly scheduled applied sessions that allow students to create visualisations on the physics that they are studying. We use a computational program called Mathematica. Mathematica is part of the Monash software catalogue available to students. |
 | Introducing concepts. Students access the Mathematica notebooks and create and explore simulations in the class time. For example, from the Monash designed introductory notebook (pdf), students explore a working billiards game to better understand the key functions that will be used later in the course. There is a fair bit of text explaining or refreshing the physics they would have from the workshop. |
 | Keep motivation. The aim is to have output that is meaningful and something that enhances the current understanding or at least, showcases why coding has become such an integral part of modern society. |
Despite the grumbling about the syntax and some annoyances with Mathematica in particular, the vast majority of the students enjoyed the session. They liked the ‘aha’ moments at the end where they can visually see and understand what the concepts are doing and the final product.
They feel like they have achieved something cool at the end. Overwhelmingly we have had positive comments in SETU for all of the years. The negative comments focus on either the length of the notebooks or the time allotted for the post session quiz. Here are three student comments from recent iterations of the course.
“I found that the computing labs were some of the most effective. I found that learning how to use Mathematica properly allowed me to use it in other circumstances, and it helped me with other assessments.”
“The computing workshops were interesting, and I think they improve my coding skills and my understanding of physics immensely.”
“The computing workshops were good for visualising the concepts discussed in lectures.”
Visualisations can be used to develop understanding of physics concepts such as Meanings, Causes, Uses and limitations and Applications. Here are three examples.
This activity requires a medium level of effort to implement.
Recommended resources and training:
You need to know the software or have access to someone who understands the software in an educational context. Decide what kind of simulation or interactive thing you want the students to create. Then grab our internal notebook as a base and tweak the functions.
Provide the introductory notebook as the starting point for all students. At the end of the introductory notebook they will have a better understanding of the code and be able to run a simple billiards game. The functions they learn in this first notebook are used in all the later tasks. Mathematica provides a textbook with help files and examples which can be helpful.
This activity serves two purposes. It teaches coding and creates cool visualisations around your subject material. Think of a concept that is interesting or confusing and needs clarifying. Think of a concept that would be helpful to see in action such as a simulation of behaviour or processes.
Use the idea of the visualisation to motivate students and why they would really want to code. It’s not to do simple things that already exist. Come up with a question and be able to get the computer to answer it for you or show you how to answer it.
You could adapt this activity to just create visualisations. Use Mathematica to create the visualisations that are not on the web without worrying about the coding aspect.
It’s an iterative process. Students will always think about it in different ways and find cool, unique ways to break things. If it doesn’t go well the first time, that’s fine. You may have to adjust the amount of scaffolding provided.
Be aware of Mathematica upgrades. Things do break and there is a need to continually check and improve the code
Here is an additional resource that you can browse to help you implement this type of teaching activity.
