Teaching Computational Physics to High School Teachers

This talk describes my experience in developing and giving an experimental workshop to expose high school teachers to basic concepts in computer modeling and give them tools to make simple 3D simulations for class demos and student projects. Teachers learned basic techniques of simulating dynamics using high school and introductory college level physics and basic elements of programming. High quality graphics were implemented in an easy to use, open source software package, VPython, currently in use in college introductory courses. Simulations covered areas of everyday physics accessible to computational approaches which would otherwise be hard to treat at introductory level, such as the physics of sports, realistic planetary motion and chaotic motion. The challenges and successes of teaching this subject in an experimental one-week-long workshop format, and to an audience completely new to the subject will be discussed.