OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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<p>In order to better understand how computational activities can help students learn quantum mechanics, we present a case study of a student Mary talking about her understanding of how to represent a wavefunction as a discretized column vector. We used a video elicitation interview technique, where Mary was shown a video of her working with her programming partner on a computational task and then asked to discuss how her understanding of the task has changed over time. Mary’s experience as an undergraduate teaching assistant allowed her to have more interactions with the course material than most students and gave her experience in communicating her understanding to students, making her a particularly effective candidate for this case study. From this interview, we have identified some of the challenges students face in coordinating discrete and continuous aspects of quantum systems in the computational context.</p>
