Teaching Monte Carlo codes at university: Development of a Geant4 course for students of schools of physics

Abstract

Nowadays, it is important that students of Schools of Physics include the study of Monte Carlo codes in their curriculum as these codes are widely used in research. At the School of Engineering Physics of the University of Wollongong, we designed and set in place a Geant4 course addressed to the Medical Physics domain. In this paper, we illustrate the main features of the course and its development since 2010. The design of this course maybe adopted to teach Geant4 or any other Monte Carlo code, and in general to teach complex software tools to students with limited computing background.