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Over the past several years, the Partnership for Integrating Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP) has curated a collection of materials to help instructors add in computational modeling to their courses. I’ll discuss the various resources and how you can contribute to the community.

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Exercise Sets, Faculty Commons, and Resources of the PICUP Website

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

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AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques. Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.



The Partnership for the Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP) has had numerous successes since its beginning. However, challenges do remain as change is a slow process. This talk, by the external evaluator for PICUP, provides an overview of the summative evaluation featured in the PICUP Capstone Conference Report. Potential future avenues are also discussed.

Success and Remaining Challenges for PICUP and Integrating Computation

The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration is working towards the detection and study of low-frequency gravitational waves using an array of rapidly rotating, highly stable radio pulsars distributed across the galaxy as accurate and precise clocks. A significant amount of research is driven by students from the high school to the graduate level. Students new to the field find themselves engaging with a large cross-section of many fields of astronomy, learning about stellar evolution, compact objects, galaxy evolution, gravitational waves, the interstellar medium, and more, and we strive to make our science accessible to them. I will describe our research program and specifically highlight the efforts within the collaboration to make our science more accessible to new students at many levels, getting them involved in cutting-edge science as quickly and easily as possible.

Simplifying Pulsar Timing Array Science for Students

Pulsars were discovered in 1967 and quickly identified as highly magnetized, fast rotating neutron stars. They are remnants of the explosion of a star known as a supernova. A neutron star has a diameter of about 7 miles and about twice as much mass as our Sun. Pulsars spin several times per second and have a magnetic field that can be a trillion times stronger than the one on Earth. As they age they emit electromagnetic radiation ranging from radio waves, visible light possibly up to gamma-rays. Their rotation causes their emission to be received in the form of pulses on Earth. The regularity of these pulses is the reason why they are often referred to as clocks in the sky. Some of them are more regular than others.

Pulsars -The Story of the Stellar Clocks in the Sky

Most science and engineering degrees at Penn State require that our students transfer to a different campus to complete their degree, so we have targeted first and second-year students and students with non-science majors. We try to provide a meaningful research experience without overwhelming them. The Green Bank Observatory (GBO) has dedicated two smaller telescopes for educational use. Our students have recently studied giant pulses from the Crab pulsar (PSR J0534-3300) and the Vela pulsar (PSR J0835-4510) using the GBO 20-meter telescope remotely. Giant pulses are rare, exceptionally large radio pulses and have only been detected in a small number of pulsars. Interactive Jupyter notebooks were developed to process the telescope data. Text files, produced by the notebooks, listing the detected giant pulses, are downloaded to students' laptops and analyzed using spreadsheet programs.

Radio Astronomy Research Experiences for Undergraduates

The radio sky is accessible at low cost with the RadioJOVE Project, a dual-dipole with receiver that is used by educators, students, and amateur radio astronomers to detect solar flares and radio bursts from Jupiter. The RadioJOVE has been used at Saint Anselm College primarily for a high school afterschool program, but recently, more sophisticated work on data analysis has been undertaken by undergraduates in the physics department. We will share results from current projects, such as progress towards interference reduction and measuring the signal from the Milky Way, and plans for future work that are appropriate for physics undergraduates who may be new to astronomy.

Radio Astronomy Instrumentation and Analysis in Undergraduate Physics

As a capstone project in an upper-level undergraduate classical mechanics course, students were asked to choose a nonlinear system and create a computational model to investigate conditions under which the system might exhibit chaotic behavior. I'll discuss some of the systems that students could choose to investigate, describe the steps in their modeling process, and show a few examples of the presentations students created. Their computational models could easily be adapted into apparatus simulations for the purposes of taking and analyzing data.

Exploring Chaos by Creating Simulations of Nonlinear Systems

During the chaotic transition to remote labs we developed a ‘chaotic pendulum’ lab for remote students for our oscillations and waves class. This involved students building their own double pendulum at home, recording its oscillations, and analyzing those movements. The first time we ran it, it did not work. We have since then iterated upon that initial design, and are happy to present something that is suitable for advanced, experimentally motivated remote students using resources commonly available at home and the free video analysis software Tracker.

Student Built Remote Chaotic Pendulums

A rationale for requiring undergraduate students to take natural science classes as part of their general education is to promote critical thinking skills and scientific literacy. Belief in pseudoscientific, paranormal, and conspiracy theory claims could be indicative of weaker scientific literacy and critical thinking skills. Thus, uncovering to what degree students subscribe to such beliefs can serve as a diagnostic test of the effectiveness of natural science classes in promoting scientific literacy and critical thinking skills. As a preliminary step in exploring this question, we measured how students enrolled in several introductory level physics and astronomy classes respond to pseudoscientific, paranormal, and conspiracy theory claims, as well as genuine scientific claims at the end of a semester of instruction by administering survey questions from the \textit{Inventory of Epistemically Unwarranted Beliefs} (Dyer \& Hall, 2018). We compare the persistence of these beliefs across classes and to prior results in the literature

Exploring Pseudoscientific Beliefs Among Undergraduate Students

At Western Kentucky University, the students in the introductory acoustics course are about one-third music majors, one-third communication disorders majors, and one-third from other disciplines. Such a diverse group provides an excellent opportunity for collaborative learning. Students from different disciplines are grouped together to build an instrument using common household materials. The instrument must be able to play a simple tune. The students showcase their instruments and explain how they work using the physics of vibration, resonance, pitches, and tone colors. In this talk, I will discuss how these projects engage students, and I will present some of the instruments that the students have made.

Instrument Projects for Acoustics Students Who Are Non-Science Majors

As part of a computational thinking practices survey development process, five secondary educators with experience integrating computation into their physics classrooms were given a fourteen-practice computational thinking framework to reflect on and discuss. The computational thinking framework was presented to the teachers via a 54-question survey which they completed and then discussed in detail. This survey gathered data on which practices were the most important to these teachers, why each teacher felt the practices they chose were the most important, and how the practices were explicitly incorporated into their classroom. Our analysis of this survey shows that there are certain patterns across the educator’s interpretation of these practices, as well as overlapping thoughts on the importance of computational thinking in the classroom. This initial data set will be used to iterate on the design of the survey and highlights variation in teachers’ priorities related to computational thinking practices.

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PICUP: The Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics