Physics
Davidson College
Physics faculty create and share custom physics courseware
Reproduced with permission from NeXT
Computer, Inc.
A Reference
Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช
1992 NeXT Computer, Inc
Davidson College, a small North Carolina liberal arts
school, has no computer science faculty and offers no
computer science major. Yet, many of the school's physics
students decide to pursue careers in computer science.
To address this situation and provide students with the
thorough grounding in mathematics required for
upper-division science courses, the Physics Department
purchased a cluster of IBM PCs in 1985 and began
integrating computer-based instruction into its curriculum.
A year ago, though, the faculty concluded that faster, more
powerful machines were needed in their upper-division
curriculum. After evaluating several workstation platforms,
the faculty decided to establish a cluster of NeXT
workstations.
In 1991, with funding from the Keck Foundation, the
National Science Foundation, and Davidson College, the
department founded the Davidson Center for Scientific
Computation, a high-level computational facility containing
11 NeXTstations, used for advanced courses as well as
faculty workshops and student research projects.
When the machines' arrived in the spring of 1991, within a
week faculty and students began experimenting with NeXTSTEP
and the Objective C language. In the classroom, many
faculty members now use customized physics applications
developed by Allegheny College (Meadville, PA), the
Rose-Hulman Institute (Terre Haute, IN), and other
institutions.
According to Associate Professor Wolfgang Christian, "NeXT
computers are easy to install and are the machines
best-suited for a department of computer nonspecialists. We
don't have a computer science faculty or a technical staff,
so we need workstations that are easy to configure and
maintain. The inclusion of Mathematica and the
availability of the standard campus word processor-
WordPerfect-were also positive factors.
"Students now have the ability to cut and paste
Mathematica graphics directly into a word
processing environment," Christian says. "Their lab
write-ups are neater and more clearly written since they
incorporate data, equipment schematics, and the results of
mathematical simulation."
Although faculty members had originally decided against
creating their own customized applications on the NeXT,
Christian says that "the power of Interface Builder and
NeXTSTEP convinced us that a modest amount of effort could
produce very effective and professional educational
software. And what we create on our campus we can share
with other campuses, as so many institutions now do with
their custom-developed NeXT software."
This winter, Christian created a two-dimensional Ising
model while a student developed a series of laser
spectroscopy simulations as part of his senior thesis
project.
Davidson faculty also worked with the NSF to sponsor a
conference on "Computational Physics in the Undergraduate
Curriculum" at the school in the fall of 1991. The meeting
explored a variety of developments in computational
physics, including symbolic computation, visualization, and
object-oriented programming. During the conference, several
attendees presented papers on physics applications they had
developed on the NeXT platform. Jim Feagin, on the physics
faculty at California State University, Fullerton, also led
a Mathematica workshop, using 18 NeXT machines.
"After almost one year of working with the NeXT machines,
we're more than pleased with the results," says Christian.
"We would buy exactly the same hardware and software again
if we had our money back in the bank. That NeXTSTEP is not
outdated a year after we purchased the machines says a lot
about how advanced the software is. Other vendors have yet
to catch up with NeXT technology."
For more information, please contact:
Wolfgang Christian
Associate Professor of Physics
Davidson College
Davidson, NC 28036
(704) 892-2322
wc@phyhost.davidson.edu