A Perfectly Inelastic Collision: Teaching Computational Modeling in High School Physics

• In high school physics classrooms, students should get opportunities to learn physics by doing physics. Computational modeling is increasingly recognized as the “third pillar” of physics along with theory and experiment. The importance of computational modeling for high school physics is increasingly reflected in curricular frameworks, for instance the Next Generation Science Standards, but little guidance is available for how to implement this in practice. Adding computational modeling to physics classrooms runs the risk of adding complications that can distract from learning physics. In this research-practitioner partnership, we collaboratively designed two units to leverage the advantages of computational modeling for doing physics (visualizing hard-to-see concepts and phenomena). In this talk, we describe our 5-lesson instructional unit on collisions and present evidence of significant learning gains in students’ physics concepts and computational modeling skills.