OSP-based Programs for Advanced Physics:
Overview

As you have already seen in this Guide, the Open Source Physics project, with its wide variety of packages, libraries, programs, and files, is a large body of work useful for the study of computational physics. Many instructors, however, do not do research in (or teach) computational physics. In order for these instructors to use OSP in their courses (or in their educational, experimental, or theoretical research), the various physical models already available within OSP must be easily accessible, modifiable, and distributable.

The paradigm for authoring, organizing, and running curricular material described in this chapter uses the Launcher and LaunchBuilder programs developed and distributed by the OSP project to accomplish this goal.
 

To accompany Chapter 15 of the Guide, we have created curricular units for classical mechanics (orbits), electromagnetism (radiation from point charges), and quantum mechanics (time evolution of superpositions of states).  This material is accessed by double-clicking the file osp_demo.jar.

There are 4 tabs to this Launcher package:

Overview contains an overview of the material and programs

Instructor Resources contains the specific programs and materials and is organized by topic

Student Exercises contains the curricular material organized by topic

Help contains a fuller description of the programs (including all of the editable parameters).

 

© Mario Belloni and Wolfgang Christian (2006).