The Coming Revolution in Physics Education

Abstract

This paper describes a high school or introductory university course in scientific programming that introduces the computer revolution into the physics curriculum at the beginning. In the first one-hour lecture, Euler’s method is presented and used to compute a solution to the analytically unsolvable two-body problem. In the remainder of the course a variety of physical systems are modeled and analyzed to demonstrate the remarkable power and wide range of applicability of the method.