DOING PHYSICS WITH A COMPUTER IN HIGH SCHOOLS: DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS
Giorgio Pastore, Maria Peressi, Strada Costiera · 2009
We report on a project devoted to teachers and last two-years students of High Schools, aimed at providing hands-on demonstrations of designing and implementing simple computer experiments to show their power in predicting and unveiling different physical phenomena. The focus is on actual problem solving and on algorithms rather than on programming languages or on sophisticated canned computer simulations. The problem of Brownian motion is discussed here as a case study. It is our opinion that time is ripe to go beyond traditional computer aided instruction to a real computational physics laboratory with students from the last two years of High School. We propose therefore to design and implement together with the students simple computer experiments to study real-world problems, the focus being on actual problem solving. We focus on problems that students can afford using basic mathematical and physical knowledge normally available to them. We select basic numerical tools, focusing on algorithms rather than on specific programming languages or techniques. In the activity already done with students of different High Schools in Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Italy), such problems have included: the motion of planets (universal gravitation, Kepler's laws), the physics of classic billiards and chaos (from circular billiards to the stadium billiards), the ray optics (light refraction), the fractal growth of surfaces (different deposition models), the Brownian motion. We focus here on the latter, as a prototype of realistic problems that are difficult to solve analytically at high school level but can be easily solved using numerical simulations, without the necessity of introducing differential equations or integral calculus.