Centralizing Agency and Scientific Inquiry in Computational Physics

Computing is more than coding: physicists use computers for many purposes, including experimental design, data collection, model building, simulation and data analysis, and it is almost impossible to imagine doing physics research without computing. Yet computing remains challenging to integrate into physics education and has often been constructed more narrowly to mean programming and numerical methods. The question arises: how do we create educational environments that allow students to engage in these broader practices? We identify agency, a topic of considerable interest in comtemporary Physics Education Research, as of key importance to the design of such environments due to the multiplicity of choices scientists make in conducting a scientific inquiry. Operationalizing these ideas, we describe such an design, Computational Making, that aims to cultivate computational work interwoven with scientific inquiry, or even multiple embedded inquiries. Features of the design that facilitate student work will be discussed.