Computational Essays: An Avenue for Scientific Creativity in Physics

TL;DR

Computational essays, combining narrative and code in notebooks, offer a new way to foster creativity and exploration in physics education, demonstrated through a pilot in an introductory course.

Contribution

This paper introduces computational essays as a novel assignment format to enhance creativity in physics teaching, supported by pilot implementation results.

Findings

Students found computational essays facilitated creative investigation.

Students reported that computational essays were challenging and motivating.

The approach leverages programming to enhance physics education.

Abstract

Computation holds great potential for introducing new opportunities for creativity and exploration into the physics curriculum. At the University of Oslo we have begun development of a new class of assignment called computational essays to help facilitate creative, open-ended computational physics projects. Computational essays are a type of essay or narrative that combine text and code to express an idea or make an argument, usually written in computational notebooks. During a pilot implementation of computational essays in an introductory electricity and magnetism course, students reported that computational essays facilitated creative investigation at a variety of levels within their physics course. They also reported finding this creativity as being both challenging and motivating. Based on these reflections, we argue that computational essays are a useful tool for leveraging the creative affordances of programming in physics education.