By Steven Krolak
(NEW ALBANY, Ind.)–The American Physical Society (APS) has awarded its 2020 Excellence in Physics Education Award to the Open Source Physics (OSP) team, which includes Dr. Kyle Forinash, emeritus professor of physics at IU Southeast.
Launched in 2002, OSP is an international group of 18 physics educators working to provide high-quality computer-based curricular resources to engage students in physics, computation and computer modeling.
Forinash’s contribution to the work of the OSP group includes two e-books: Waves, a set of interactive tutorials designed to teach the fundamentals of wave dynamics, and Sound, a series of interactive simulations and animations that explore the physics of sound.
According to the citation, the award recognizes OSP for “sustained commitment to computational physics education through creating and disseminating programming environments, books, software, simulations, and other tools to support computational thinking, and for research establishing the value of these tools and best practices for their use.”
The APS is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. Its 55,000 members are active as physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the U.S. and throughout the world.