Open Source Physics, or OSP, is a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 and Davidson College

Davidson College

Davidson College is a private liberal arts college in Davidson, North Carolina. The college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine, although it has recently dropped to 11th in U.S. News...

, whose mission is to spread the use of open source code libraries, tools, and compiled simulations for physics and other numerical simulations. The OSP collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. The code library is in the Java programming language and licensed with GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) licenses.

Sub-projects

They have four projects with this purpose.

• OSP libraries: Java code libraries for numerical simulations. The OSP code library was created to meet the need by the broader science education community for a synthesis of curriculum development, computational physics, computer science, and physics education that will be useful for scientists and students wishing to write their own simulations and develop their own curricular material. OSP code library is described in the OSP User's Guide by Wolfgang Christian in An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods by Harvey Gould, Jan Tobochnik, and Wolfgang Christian.

• Easy Java Simulations
  Easy Java Simulations
  EJS, or Easy Java Simulations, is an open-source software tool, part of the Open Source Physics project, designed for the creation of discrete computer simulations....
  
   (Ejs): A free and open source computer-based modeling environment used to generate automatically Java code. Easy Java Simulations (EJS) is an authoring and modeling tool that allows users to create Java programs with minimal programming. Ejs creates programs that other people can easily inspect or modify.

• Tracker: A free and open source video analysis program. Tracker is an image and video analysis package and modeling tool that is built upon the Open Source Physics Java code library. Features include object tracking with position, velocity and acceleration overlays and graphs, special effect filters, multiple reference frames, calibration points and line profiles for analysis of spectra and interference patterns. It is designed to be used in introductory college physics labs and lectures.

• OSP Curricular Development: A set of programs, packages, and worksheets for the teaching of advanced physics topics. Many instructors do not teach (or do research in) computational physics. For these instructors they have made the various physical models available in an easily accessible, modifiable, and distributable form for teaching of physics. For convenience, OSP programs are almost always packaged in Java archive (jar) files. These jar files contain compiled code and resources such curricular materials, images, and data files.

Awards

The project has recently received an important award of Science Prize for Online Resources in Education, or SPORE from Science magazine

Science Magazine

Science Magazine was a half-hour television show produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1975 to 1979.The show was hosted by geneticist David Suzuki, who previously hosted the daytime youth programme Suzuki On Science...

Here is site of more information about this award:
arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/11/science-education-prize-goes-to-open-source-physics.ars

External links

• Official website of the Open Source Physics Project