U4 - Computational Physics

The U4 network is a collaboration of the universities of Ghent, Göttingen, Groningen and Uppsala to provide a supportive platform for joint cooperative initiatives in the field of education, research and institutional management, as well as to offer a solid framework for cooperation as preferential partners in international projects and contexts.

Within this network the Computational Physics project was created to improve and internationalize the computational physics education of undergraduate students at the 4 partner universities. For this is was found that more emphasis should be put on computer exercises in Python as a regular occurence in all lectures during the physics education, allowing the students to improve their knowledge of programming during their education and learn to treat many interesting problems that are otherwise near impossible to solve.

To ensure the quality of this education, new tools are made available to lecturers and students. These include tutorials, teaching aids, visualization guides with examples or high quality, fully fleshed out exercises and student tutorials on special topics. The format of the exercises allows for the use of interactive environments (jupyter notebooks) for efficient programming and presentation in one.