ROLE OF COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE IN UNDERSTANDING PHYSICS Mukesh Kumar Department of Physics, SSNC, University of Delhi (INDIA) physics.ssn@gmail.com Abstract The multidisciplinary study of computer science in science education over the past quarter of a century has led to the articulation of important new conceptual perspectives and methodologies that are of value both to researchers in these fields as well as to teachers and students. This article describes progress and changes in developing and implementing of education materials in computational physics education; particularly at University of Delhi. This explains the time series analysis of computational interest of students for a three-year undergraduate degree program leading to a Bachelor's and two year post-graduate degree program leading to a Master’s degree in Physics. Finally, some remarks are made about implementation issues and scope of computational physics study at present. Keywords: Computational Science, Computational Education, 1 INTRODUCTION Learning through computer has been one of the important tools that are motivated by many real world problems. Computer engineers also introduced mathematical frameworks for investigating these scientific problems via computer. Many interested obtained results have been in these frameworks. These obtained theoretical results evolve a new thinking about learning, that is, science learning through computer can play a key role in discovery science. These evolve a new branch of science - Computational Science which can enable automatic discoveries of scientific knowledge and techniques. Computational Science is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field involving computer science, mathematics, science and engineering. The idea behind it was that computational science is an umbrella for many disciplines rather than a discipline itself. Computational Physics Education views the computer as a tool for advance physics education, without questioning what goes on inside the black box. To formulate, simulate and understand complex phenomena of scientific and engineering interest among its students, computational science program was started in physics departments around two decades back in 1996 at University of Delhi, also known as DU (Delhi University). But use of computer for research purpose was started earlier by physicist in around 1980. This new program on Computational Science in the Department of Physics and Astrophysics was supervised and developed by a group of teachers including Prof. V. S. Varma, Prof. Amitabh Mukherjee, Prof. S. Mahajan, Prof. P.D. Gupta, who work in the area of High energy physics and CosmologicalScience.The aim was to produce new and proper understanding and approaches to the research and educational possibilities which are also found in regular learning systems and which could motivate students from the research point of view. The related courses were initially offered at the postgraduate level and then basic version was extended to under graduate level. Even despite the long journey and importance in scientific research, unfortunately, this core version of the course is still not popular at the university. One thing good happened in this direction is that it successful in providing computational flavor to its students. 2 COURSE BACKGROUND Since beginning the Computational Physics course at the University of Delhi was offer at level - both undergraduate- three-year degree program leading to a Bachelor’s degreeand postgraduate levels- two year post-graduate degree program leading to aMaster’s degree in Physics. Proceedings of EDULEARN13 Conference 1st-3rd July 2013, Barcelona, Spain ISBN: 978-84-616-3822-2 1385