Integrating Numerical Computation into the Modeling Instruction Curriculum

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to incorporate computational problem-solving into high school physics education using VPython, enhancing modeling practices and connecting various physics representations for students with no prior programming experience.

Contribution

It introduces a computational approach within the Modeling Instruction curriculum, integrating numerical modeling and programming to improve physics understanding.

Findings

Students learned to construct computational models using VPython.

The approach linked different physics representations coherently.

It extended physics modeling to real-world problems.

Abstract

We describe a way to introduce physics high school students with no background in programming to computational problem-solving experiences. Our approach builds on the great strides made by the Modeling Instruction reform curriculum. This approach emphasizes the practices of "Developing and using models" and "Computational thinking" highlighted by the NRC K-12 science standards framework. We taught 9th-grade students in a Modeling-Instruction-based physics course to construct computational models using the VPython programming environment. Numerical computation within the Modeling Instruction curriculum provides coherence among the curriculum's different force and motion models, links the various representations which the curriculum employs, and extends the curriculum to include real-world problems that are inaccessible to a purely analytic approach.