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Summary1.IntroductionOptics, as a part of physics disciplines, is a formal subject with concepts that can be difficult to understand for undergraduate students. Since 2000, the members of the UB optical research group, have been developing materials in electronic format for teaching theoretical, technological and experimental concepts related with optics and photonics 1, 2. The objective was to generate enough resources to allow students to manipulate and investigate concepts, equations and images, before study based on the exclusive use of a textbook. The main difficulty of our students in their learning is the understanding of theoretical concepts related with experimental situations. As a consequence, the goal of this project is to generate a small number of sophisticated programs that allows a student to interact with all the significant concepts studied in an undergraduate optics course The Java Optics Course (JOC) is an ensemble of teaching resources for Physical Optics at university level as part of Physics studies. Some of the resources can also be used by high-school teachers or students to illustrate and broaden knowledge on certain aspects of physics at this teaching level. The resources may be used either in an ordinary course as support material or as the main working tool in an on-line Internet course. The kernel of the resources developed is a software package, designed to simulate the physics of several optical phenomena. All the programs are freely available in the JOC website, http://www.ub.edu/javaoptics. The applets have been programmed in java using JNLP 3 technology to assure a correct behavior of the programs with independence of the software or operating system installed in the computer. We have recently started to investigate the connections between the learning progress of our students and the use of simulation programs. Information is collected by enquiring regularly of the students’ opinion and by analyzing their answers in exams (particularly the wrong answers). Preliminary results of the research show that concepts that are difficult to understand (for instance: virtual image formation, reflection of waves in dielectric media, resolution in interferometers or diffraction of light in Fresnel conditions) are more easily acquired if the students can experiment and manipulate the concepts using these applets. 2.The software packageSome of the programs available in the course are:
We are currently developing more simulations and several programs are in beta testing stage. We expect that new programs, including dispersion of light in prisms, vision models, fiber optics, propagation in anisotropic media and photometry, will be available in fall of 2005. ReferencesA. Carnicer,
“An on-line applet-based course for undergraduate students,”
in 19th Congress of the International Commission for Optics (ICO XIX),
(2002). Google Scholar
A. Carnicer,
“The Java Optics Course,”
(2003) http://www.ub.edu/javaoptics Google Scholar
See, for instance, http://java.sun.com/products/javawebstart/index.jsp Google Scholar
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