Colloquium: Computational Pedagogy in Undergraduate Physics, or Perturbation Theory for Sophomores

There is an increasing awareness among physics educators, promoted by groups like PICUP and the Matter and Interactions textbook, that the incorporation of computational physics into undergraduate physics courses can greatly facilitate students' understanding. Much of the dialogue surrounding computational integration focuses on the use of computational techniques to help students achieve the usual learning objectives in those courses more fully. While this is true, it overlooks an even greater benefit: computational physics allows students to achieve learning objectives that would otherwise be out of reach, and to develop expert-level approaches to physics much earlier than usual. In this talk, I will present a series of projects from the undergraduate computational physics course at Syracuse University in which students learn the fundamentals of perturbative reasoning while exploring oscillatory systems, and along the way learn some striking things about nonlinearities in guitar strings that are not widely known even to acousticians and musicians.