Book chapter

During 2024 and 2025, I have been writing a chapter in a new book. The book aims to capture how computation is, or can be, used in physics education.

My part in the book comes in chapter 11 where I introduce some concepts from Social Semiotics and Variation Theory of Learning and how these can be used to analyze both how students can use programming to learn physics, but also how teachers choose to implement computation in their classrooms.

In the study, a group of upper secondary physics teacher took part in a summer-course at Lund University. The course was designed to teach the teachers to code a simple particle based physics simulation, with a visualization element. The idea was that the teachers would identify aspects of the act of programming that they saw as useful for teaching physics, and adapt those parts for their own teaching.

The teachers were later interviewed after they had implemented computation in their physics classroom in some manner. They described what they had done, which ranged from using programming to replicate live demonstrations and compare the result from the measurement and the simulation. Others restructured their entire course to use programming to teach about kinematics and forces where the pupils themselves programmed a particle simulation.