Abstract:

The multidisciplinary study of computer science in science education over the past quarter of a century has led to the articulation of important new conceptual perspectives and methodologies that are of value both to researchers in these fields as well as to teachers and students. This article describes progress and changes in developing and implementing of education materials in computational physics education; particularly at University of Delhi. This explains the time series analysis of computational interest of students for a three-year undergraduate degree program leading to a Bachelor's and two year post-graduate degree program leading to a Master’s degree in Physics. Finally, some remarks are made about implementation issues and scope of computational physics study at present.

This paper reflects the views on the past experiences of computational education which physics department of university of Delhi has gone through over a period of time. Now the students joining research later do not find difficult to use computational methods. The responses indicate an increase in interest, and the exit responses indicate that 50% of the students plan to take another Computational science course and 40% plan to minor in Computational science which would full the multidisciplinary requirement of the a science curriculum. From the feedback we have from students in the computational thinking, it seems the problem driven format of the course, the ability to quickly be able to write programs meaningful to them, and the use of visualization tools played a crucial role in the overall increased interest. So all these create a better environment for the research in the physics department.Those who don’t join the research after under-graduate and graduate education finds better chance in the job market due to their computational background.

Keywords:

Computational Science Education.