Contact: Phil Hearn
John T. Foley
A Mississippi State physics professor is the winner of a prestigious excellence-in-teaching award for development of an interactive computer graphics system to help college students and others learn about optics.
John T. Foley recently received the Southeast Section of the American Physical Society's 2003 George B. Peagram Medal for excellence in teaching. He was joined at the organization's meeting in Wilmington, N.C., by eight MSU undergraduate physics majors.
The award recognizes the department of physics and astronomy faculty member "for his outstanding undergraduate and graduate teaching and his creativity, leadership and dissemination of The Optics Project (TOP)," a multidisciplinary effort to develop an interactive computer graphics system for the simulation and visualization of optical phenomena.
Foley leads the team that developed The Optics Project on the Web (WebTOP), a 3-D, interactive computer graphics system that runs inside a Web browser and provides simulations of optical phenomena for the teaching and learning of optics.
His faculty collaborators are Taha Mzoughi, an MSU associate professor of physics and astronomy, and professor David Banks of Florida State University. Six computer science and physics students also are a part of the team.
"This award recognizes the contribution Professor Foley and co-workers have made to physics and to optics by bringing Web-based visualization to everyone with a computer, from K-12 students to advanced university courses," said department head Mark A. Novotny.
"Our work is primarily intended for college students, although high school students can use it too," said Foley, an expert in theoretical optics who obtained a doctorate from the University of Rochester in 1978. He also is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.
Foley said the main MSU Web site for the project may be accessed at http://webtop.msstate.edu. WebTOP, which is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, may be run from that site or the software can be downloaded from there and run locally on the user's machine.
TOP is a pedagogical framework from which optics and field-related physics can be taught, and is an environment in which more sophisticated new algorithms for simulation and visualization can be developed. It has a modular structure and each module is designed to be interactive, three-dimensional and animated, as appropriate.
WebTOP, an enhanced, Web-based version of TOP, has been used to help teach undergraduate optics and introductory physics classes at more than 20 universities across the nation.