Student engagement and learning with Quantum Composer Shaeema Zaman Ahmed 1 , * Carrie A. Weidner 1* , † Jesper H. M. Jensen 1 , Jacob F. Sherson 1 , and H. J. Lewandowski 2,3 1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark 2 Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA and 3 JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA Knowledge of quantum mechanical systems is becoming more important for many science and engineering students who are looking to join the emerging quantum workforce. To better prepare a wide range of students for these careers, we must seek to develop new tools to enhance our education in quantum topics. We present initial studies on the use of one of these such tools, Quantum Composer, a 1D quantum simulation and visualization tool developed for education and research purposes. In particular, we conducted five think-aloud interviews with students who worked through an exercise using Quantum Composer that focused on the statics and dynamics of quantum states in single- and double-harmonic well systems. Our results show that Quantum Composer helps students to obtain the correct answers to the questions posed, but additional support is needed to facilitate the development of student reasoning behind these answers. In addition, we find that students explore familiar and unfamiliar problems in similar ways, indicating that Quantum Composer is a useful tool for exploring systems that students have not seen before. I. INTRODUCTION Due to the recent attention on quantum technologies and their economic impact as a result of the so-called second quantum revolution [1], efforts are increasingly focused on educating the next generation of individuals who will make up the backbone of the quantum work- force. As such, current research is increasingly focus- ing on how higher education institutions can provide the preparation required for people to be successful in this emerging industry and to bring quantum technologies out of academic labs and into society [2]. To be able to meet this demand for a quantum literate workforce, the community needs to develop new quantum curricula at all levels [2–4], effective methods of teaching quantum mechanics to address common student difficul- ties in learning the relevant material [5, 6], and tools that allow students to visualize and explore quantum systems (e.g., those described in Refs. [7–9]). If implemented ef- fectively, these efforts will allow students to gain the skills necessary to contribute to the development and deploy- ment of quantum technologies. Here, we present a study of a new quantum soft- ware tool known as Quantum Composer (or simply Com- poser) [10]. Composer is an interactive and flexible flow- based programming tool designed to allow users to sim- ulate and visualize the static and dynamic properties of one-dimensional quantum systems, including systems that are not readily analytically tractable. This study, which is an extension of preliminary work [11], was de- signed to identify how students used Composer to ex- plore questions posed about systems they had seen be- fore and systems they were unfamiliar with. Previous work suggested that students used the visualizations con- tained within Composer to develop their understanding * These two authors contributed equally. † cweidner@phys.au.dk of a problem. The work presented here aims to probe the use of Composer more deeply. In particular, we conducted think-aloud interviews with five students as they worked through an exercise designed to guide them through the statics and dynam- ics of quantum states in single- and double-harmonic well systems. Our goal was to perform an initial exploratory study of how students used Composer in an interview setting before probing how Composer could be used in a classroom environment in future studies. In particular, our study sought to answer the following four research questions: • RQ1: Did Composer help students determine cor- rect answers and reasoning of problems in simple 1D quantum systems? • RQ2: What Composer features were most used by students? • RQ3: How was the use of Composer features con- nected with outcomes? • RQ4: How did students use Composer to explore an unknown system as compared to a system they have worked with previously? This paper is organized as follows: Section II places our study in the context of the larger field of quantum edu- cation research and existing quantum simulation tools, as well as providing a brief description of Composer it- self. This is followed by a description of the methods we used for the study in Sec. III. Our results are presented in Sec. IV and discussed in Sec. V. Section VII concludes with some ideas for future research. arXiv:2104.13260v1 [physics.ed-ph] 27 Apr 2021