Open Source Physics, or OSP, is a project sponsored by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

and

Davidson College Davidson College is a private liberal arts college in Davidson, North Carolina. It was established in 1837 by the Concord Presbytery and named after Revolutionary War general William Lee Davidson, who was killed at the nearby Battle of Cowan� ...

, whose mission is to spread the use of open source code libraries that take care of a lot of the heavy lifting for physics: drawing and plotting, differential equation solvers, exporting to animated GIFs and movies, etc., tools, and compiled simulations for physics and other

numerical simulation Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be deter ...

s . The OSP collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. The code library is in the

Java programming language Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers ''write once, run an ...

and licensed with GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

) licenses. The site now serves over 10,000 visitors per month. The Open Source Physics Project is an extension of the

Physlet Physlets are ''phys''ics app''lets'' that are free for non-commercial use and were created by the same team as the Open Source Physics Project. Since their creation at Davidson College in 1998, over 2,000 individual exercises have been created usin ...

Project.

Sub-projects

They have four projects with this purpose. *OSP libraries: Java code libraries for numerical simulations. The OSP code library was created to meet the need by the broader science education community for a synthesis of curriculum development, computational physics, computer science, and physics education that will be useful for scientists and students wishing to write their own simulations and develop their own curricular material. OSP code library is described in the OSP User's Guide by Wolfgang Christian in An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods by Harvey Gould, Jan Tobochnik, and Wolfgang Christian. * Easy Java Simulations (EJS) (New name: Easy JavaScript Simulations = EjsS): A free and open source computer-based modeling environment used to generate automatically Java and JavaScript code. Easy JavaScript Simulations is an authoring and modeling tool that allows users to create Java or JavaScript programs with minimal programming. EjsS creates programs that other people can easily inspect or modify. *Tracker: An

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Ope ...

video analysis and modeling tool designed for use in

physics education Physics education refers to the methods currently used to teach physics. Physics Education Research refers to an area of pedagogical research that seeks to improve those methods. Historically, physics has been taught at the high school and colleg ...

and distributed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

. In the context of physics education, ''video analysis'' means tracking the motions of objects in videos to obtain their 2-D position-time data and associated physical quantities such as velocity, acceleration, momentum and energy. Computerized video analysis has been used widely in physics education since the 1990s. By contrast, ''video modeling'' involves defining a

theoretical model A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may ...

and drawing it as an animation directly on a video and was introduced only in 2009. Tracker has a built-in

dynamic model A mathematical model is a description of a system using mathematical concepts and language. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed mathematical modeling. Mathematical models are used in the natural sciences (such as physics, b ...

builder to define particles that move according to Newton's laws. External models built with

spreadsheets A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cel ...

, Easy Java Simulations or other modeling program can also be used. Tracker also has a

line profile Spectral line shape describes the form of a feature, observed in spectroscopy, corresponding to an energy change in an atom, molecule or ion. This shape is also referred to as the spectral line profile. Ideal line shapes include Lorentzian, Gauss ...

tool for measuring light spectra and other optical phenomena. Tracker 1.0 was distributed on disc at the 2003 Summer Meeting of the

American Association of Physics Teachers The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) was founded in 1930 for the purpose of "dissemination of knowledge of physics, particularly by way of teaching." There are more than 10,000 members in over 30 countries. AAPT publications includ ...

. The current version, 6.0, was released in 2021. *OSP Curricular Development: A set of programs, packages, and worksheets for the teaching of advanced physics topics. Many instructors do not teach (or do research in) computational physics. For these instructors they have made the various physical models available in an easily accessible, modifiable, and distributable form for teaching of physics. For convenience, OSP programs are almost always packaged in Java archive (jar) files. These jar files contain compiled code and resources such curricular materials, images, and data files.

Awards

In 2011, the project received an important award, the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education, or SPORE from

Science magazine ''Science'', also widely referred to as ''Science Magazine'', is the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and one of the world's top academic journals. It was first published in 1880, ...

Ars Technica
Science Education Prize Goes to Open Source Physics
retrieved 2011-12-05. In 2015, the project received the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICTs in Educatio

and Excellence Award Multimedia Physics Teaching and Learning Conference MPTL2

In 2020, the project received the Excellence in Physics Education Award from the American Physical Societ

References

;Notes *M. Belloni, W. Christian, and D. Brown, "Open Source Physics Curricular Material for Quantum Mechanics: Dynamics and Measurement of Quantum Two-state Superpositions," Computing in Science and Engineering 9, 4, 24-31 (2007). *W. Christian, ''Open Source Physics: A User’s Guide with Examples,'' Addison-Wesley (2006). *W. Christian, M. Belloni, and D. Brown, "An Open Source XML Framework for Authoring Curricular Material," Computing in Science and Engineering, September/October (2006). {{refend

External links

Official website of the Open Source Physics Project

Science education prize goes to Open Source Physics
By John Timmer
NTNUJAVA Virtual Physics Laboratory is the largest library of EJS simulations
by Fu-Kwun Hwang
Open Educational Resources / Open Source Physics @ Singapore is the largest library of EJSS simulations outside USA
by Loo Kang Lawrence WEE
Easy JavaScript Simulation website
by Francisco Esquembre and Félix Jesús Garcia Clemente
Tracker website
by Douglas Brown Free computer libraries Free science software Free simulation software