Historical overview of computation in physics education and the development of the Partnership for Integrating Computation in Undergraduate Physics (PICUP)

Although the use of computers has permeated much of physics research over the past sixty years, until recently the use of computational modeling of physical phenomena has rarely been seen as essential to physics undergraduate teaching. In this talk we will provide a brief history of using computers and computational physics with undergraduates, and how the slow adoption of this work motivated the establishment of the Partnership for Integrating Computation in Undergraduate Physics (PICUP), an organization that has played a leading role in fostering the implementation of computational physics in undergraduate education.