THE USE OF MODERN SOFTWARE PACKAGES IN THE TEACHING OF PHYSICS

Abstract

The utilization of computer simulations is not a new subject, but its importance has increased in the industrial as well as in the educational field in the last years. The academic use of this tool in Physics is already much disseminated, although its educational use is still restricted. One of the major reasons for this is the restricted number of good computer applications tailored for the University level, especially in Portuguese and a lack of pedagogical plans to use them. In this scenario, the Physics Department of FEI (Faculdade de Engenharia Industrial) decided to begin a long-term research project to produce and to apply computer simulation in Physics teaching. We have already produced six computer applications and four of them (simple pendulum, friction force, ballistics and damped oscillations) have been used for the last two years by the entry level engineering students at FEI, as part of their Physics laboratory activities. The simulation sessions take place at the computer rooms and the students usually work alone in this activity. Although the programs developed do not have all the features of a commercial program, in some aspects they show advantages to those. Five out of the six programs developed are real time simulations. The main reason to implement this feature is that we have observed a higher attraction to programs that simulate an event in the same time scale that the real one. The real time programs also have animations to illustrate and to allow a better understanding of the phenomenon. Some preliminary qualitative results have shown that the students are more involved with the classes and that they are more interested in the subject when computer simulations are employed. These good results are driving us to create new simulations. We are planning to create versions of these applications using the Java language, in order to make them a powerful tool to help in distance learning projects. We are also planning to precede in the near future a quantitative analysis of the pedagogical results.