Topics
Computer software, Java, Computer simulation, Computational physics, Educational aids, Educational assessment, Teaching, Libraries, Scholarly publishing, User interfaces

The September issue of AJP begins a one-year experiment to augment AJP articles with computer simulations from the Open Source Physics (OSP) Collection in the ComPADRE National Science Digital Library.1 Although there are many well-organized websites and CDs of computer simulations that support textbooks, simulations associated with journal articles are more difficult to find and may be difficult to use and adapt. Even if an author submits a program to an online archive or posts a simulation or source code on a personal web page, the disparate operating systems, programming styles, programming languages, and user interfaces make it difficult for users to explore and modify the simulation. We seek to address these problems through an integration of the ComPADRE National Science Digital Library with (1) a large collection of ready-to-use Java simulations for physics and astronomy teaching, (2) the Easy Java Simulations (EJS) tool to create new models and...

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