Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni – Excellence in Physics Education Award

The Office of Grants and Contracts congratulates Professor Emeritus of Physics, Wolfgang Christian and Professor and Chair of Physics, Mario Belloni on receipt of the Excellence in Physics Education Award from the American Physical Society.

The Open Source Physics Project (OSP) team was recognized for their “sustained commitment to computational physics education through creating and disseminating programming environments, books, software, simulations, and other tools to support computational thinking, and for research, establishing the value of these tools and the best practices for their use.”

The Open Source Physics Team members are: Wolfgang Christian (Project PI), Lyle Barbato, Mario Belloni, Douglas Brown, Thomas Colbert, Anne J. Cox, Melissa Dancy, Francisco Esquembre, Kyle Forinash, Michael R. Gallis, Felix J. Garcia, Harvey Gould, William Junkin, Bruce Mason, Todd Timberlake, Aaron Titus, Jan Tobochnik, & Loo Kang Wee. 

The OSP Project began with a 2002 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to Davidson Professors Christian and Belloni to develop interactive Java applet-based curricular material known as Physlets.  A second NSF grant (NSF DUE 0442581) awarded in 2005, “OPTIC: Open Physics Technology for Interactive Curricula,” supported rewriting Physlet code into an open source library, for a Java edition of An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods.  Interest in computational physics attracted additional educational authors, tools and simulations resulting in an OSP-based digital library serving over 200,000 users.  Additional information may be found here.