Role of the Mathematica Software in Physics Teaching

This paper describes innovative uses of the Mathematica software in Physics teaching. It provides an overview of the Mathematica functionality that makes it easy for educators to integrate the software into pre-college, college and higher education classrooms. Mathematica offers an interactive classroom experience that helps students explore and grasp concepts and gives teachers the tools they need to easily create supporting course materials, presentations and assignments. Mathematica can easily generate visualizations in the learning of scientific phenomena and processes. It can create or recreate a phenomenon or environment corresponding to a physical process through simulation modeling and can thus provide a powerful instructional tool for addressing conceptual and procedural learning difficulties. We have outlined some pedagogical ideas that could drive the use of this computing software in the classroom to make a significant impact on Physics learning and creating cognitive links between the world of mathematics and that of physics. In this manuscript we have demonstrated equation solving and plotting through the use of the Mathematica software. Also, we have focused on providing some examples of simulation related problems such as the oscillating pendulum.