How physics students build computational literacy by creating computational literature

How do science students become computationally literate within their disciplines? In a new study, Tor Ole Odden and Benjamin Zwickl followed physics students as they wrote computational essays—narrative documents that blend live code, analysis, and explanation.

Bildet kan inneholde: tekst, bok, utgivelse.

The journal of the learning sciences, where the article was published first.

By Tor Ole Odden, Benjamin Zwickl

Published May 5, 2025

These essays, the authors argue, are a form of computational literature that mirrors how practicing scientists use code not just to calculate, but to think, model, and communicate. The authors found that in writing these essays, students took up authentic scientific practices: building simulations, interpreting results, and presenting arguments grounded in computation.

For educators aiming to integrate computing into science education, this work highlights a promising approach: don’t just teach students to code—invite them to read, remix, and write computational literature within their own disciplines.

Background

Computation has revolutionized science and is gradually being integrated into science teaching and learning. However, theoretical frameworks for understanding how students learn to use computation as a disciplinary tool are currently underdeveloped.

Methods

In this study, we propose computational literacy as a productive theoretical lens on this subject, with a particular focus on how people engage with and write computational literature. This theory views computation as a literacy consisting of material, cognitive, and social elements, to which we add the notion of computational literature that has epistemic and communicative aspects. We use this perspective, operationalized through both narrative case study and conjecture mapping methodologies, to analyze the cases of two pairs of students writing computational essays in an intermediate physics course.

Findings

Through these case studies we see the pairs leveraging elements of their existing computational literacy to both engage with and produce computational literature in their discipline. This, in turn, helps them to adopt the practices of computational scientists and deepen their computational literacy.

Contribution

This study shows the usefulness of computational literacy as a framework for understanding computational learning within a discipline and elaborates on the role that computational literature plays in that process.

The full article can be read at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10508406.2025.2494791#abstract

Published May 5, 2025 9:28 PM - Last modified May 9, 2025 5:17 PM