Joliet Junior College Receives National Science Foundation Grant Funding

Joliet Junior College (JJC) will receive $93,330 in funding from a National Science Foundation grant to support participation in the Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP), a project involving physics faculty from across the country.

“This collaboration brings recognition to JJC as a leading example of how innovations in physics education can work at community colleges,” said Andrew Morrison, physics professor at JJC.

PICUP aims to bring computational techniques to the physics classroom, and 2024-2025 marks the first year JJC will be funded in the project. According to Morrison, one of the goals for the project this year is to “get the curricular materials more widely used at community colleges.”

Throughout the school year, PICUP will hold grant-funded Distributed Institutes for Computational Education in Physics (DICE) workshops across the country. One of the first will be at Lewis University this fall with Morrison as part of the organizing team.

“I will be facilitating workshops with our collaborators, and I will be learning from them and the other participants, allowing me to bring ideas that we develop back to the physics classes that I teach,” Morrison said. “Other physics faculty at JJC will be invited to participate in the workshops and will also have access to materials that are developed in the workshops.”

Participating in this project will allow faculty to “get better at teaching computational physics in their home institutions,” ultimately helping prepare students for work they may come across in future STEM classes and careers.

“In modern science and engineering work, there is nothing that is done without the use of computers,” Morrison said. “Many of the interesting and novel questions cannot be answered simply by solving equations by hand — they must be solved on computers. The earlier we can introduce STEM students to computational techniques, the better prepared they will be for the advanced problem solving where computers are the only way to handle the task. Even if students do not become the main programmer for a project, they will benefit from understanding the techniques involved in doing computational physics.”