Physics and Mathematics university students’ ideas about computer simulations

In an increasingly complex world, the science of complex systems is well-positioned to provide epistemological lenses and methodological tools to analyse the reality. Among the tools developed, computer simulations have a crucial role, but the ways in which they are conceptualized by graduate and undergraduate students have not been extensively explored. Framed within a wider research about the educational role of simulations of complex systems, the goal of this work is to provide insights into the understanding about simulations of university Physics and Mathematics students. For this purpose, a study has been designed with a group of bachelor and master students within a course of Physics Teaching. The object of this paper is to present the results of the data analysis of the preliminary questionnaires, where 27 students were asked to express their ideas about simulations. The bottom-up process of qualitative analysis has allowed to point out, and organize in categories, different ways in which simulations are conceptualized by the students, in terms of: i) scope for which simulations are used, ii) their relationship with experiments and models, and iii) the examples of simulations they refer to.