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The use of custom, inexpensive home experiment kits during the pandemic revealed several strategies that will be applied to traditional teaching of introductory physics labs at Oglethorpe University.&amp;nbsp; These include: using the&amp;nbsp;PHYPHOX app and smartphone sensors;&amp;nbsp;cost-effectively increasing&amp;nbsp;the number of onsite lab stations using kit parts so more students are directly involved in running the experiments;&amp;nbsp;having each student collect their own data and write up results with them while still collaborating with team members;&amp;nbsp;limiting the number of formal lab reports required after students demonstrate documentation skills in order to focus on spreadsheet development&amp;nbsp;and conceptual knowledge;&amp;nbsp;and having home kits available even when onsite so students can use them remotely for custom projects based on standard experiments.&amp;nbsp; In particular, having all students collect and analyze their own data virtually eliminates the &#39;freeloader&#39; syndrome where some students do far less work than others on experiments and documentation.

AAPT WM 21

Lessons from Home Experiment Kits for Traditional Introductory Physics Labs

lessons learned

pandemic adaptations

home experiment kits

Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalising what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.


ICCC'20

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.
Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviors that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalizing what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.



The use of custom, inexpensive home experiment kits during the pandemic revealed several strategies that will be applied to traditional teaching of introductory physics labs at Oglethorpe University.&nbsp; These include: using the&nbsp;PHYPHOX app and smartphone sensors;&nbsp;cost-effectively increasing&nbsp;the number of onsite lab stations using kit parts so more students are directly involved in running the experiments;&nbsp;having each student collect their own data and write up results with them while still collaborating with team members;&nbsp;limiting the number of formal lab reports required after students demonstrate documentation skills in order to focus on spreadsheet development&nbsp;and conceptual knowledge;&nbsp;and having home kits available even when onsite so students can use them remotely for custom projects based on standard experiments.&nbsp; In particular, having all students collect and analyze their own data virtually eliminates the 'freeloader' syndrome where some students do far less work than others on experiments and documentation.

technical paper

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We want to ask students to see patterns in time-series graphs of voltage. Traditionally, we put bulky, expensive oscilloscopes on the benches or made everyone share, or didn't even have one for our classroom. Now, we're teaching circuits with Tinkercad, or we're having students do self-directed projects with Arduinos, both with on-screen graphs of voltage over time. This is helping me teach reading time-series graphs to pre-high-school&nbsp;students;&nbsp;and logical approaches to patterns, and measuring time, to college&nbsp;students. We'll look at videos of oscilliscopes, simulated oscilloscopes, and similar tools.

Look Under Your Chair, Because You're All Getting Oscilloscopes!

The EQuIPD grant is a Department of Education Funded teacher professional development program centered on use of core content models, modeling instructionall practices and use of technology for collaborative inquiry experiences for students. As districts pivoted to new learning environments owing to COVID, teachers were placed in either hybrid, FTF or virtual classrooms.&nbsp; The grant has worked to support teachers in new forms of collaborative inquiry in several ways including sending kits home to students, teacher demonstrations/students analyzing data sets, virutal experiments and using cell phone apps (Arduino Science Journal, phyphox and Physics Toolkit. This talk will highlight the support for teachers to implement these new modes of inquiry and showcase some example lessons where students used cell phone apps to collect and analyze data in collaborative teams through an inquiry proccess to develop a core concept model in physical science. This model is appropriate for students at any level.

Working Together Alone: Colloborative Inquiry using Cell Phone Apps

Our algebra-based introductory physics class for life science students is entirely remote this year. The course is typically taught as a highly interactive multi-section studio class. It was a challenging transition but, by making extensive use of Zoom breakout rooms, we think we have done this fairly successfully. The transition has been a tremendous amount of work. The things we plan to retain when we eventually go back to in-person teaching include: (1) using interactive Google doc worksheets, rather than a printed workbook ; (2) spending less time presenting slides and more time with students working together; (3) regular low-stakes quizzes instead of a few high-stakes tests; and (4) streamlining the course, with fewer topics and not as many moving parts. This talk will go over details of these features, which seem to have worked well and which we hope will make for a better student experience in future semesters.

Keepers: From remote studio physics back to in-person

The STEMcoding project launched in 2017 with a series of "physics of video games" activities designed for high school physics and physical science. Many of these activities are described on the STEMcoding YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/c/STEMcoding) and we have trained dozens of teachers through various workshops. In 2020 these resources became a lifeline for many of these teachers who needed to find solutions for distance and hybrid learning. And over summer 2020 we redesigned nearly all of our activities with this in mind. This talk provides and overview of how 2020 has shaped the STEMcoding project.

The STEMcoding Approach to Distance Learning

The pandemic timeline has turn out to be much longer than initially predicted, and the need for a remote teaching will be the norm for many more months (if not years) to come. &nbsp;The immediate switch to the remote teaching that happened due to COVID-19, not surprisingly, had the greatest detrimental effect on laboratory components of physics courses and challenged academic integrity during testing. Smaller courses during summer time allowed us to test different approaches and more adequately prepare for large-enrollment classes for the upcoming Fall semester. Decisions when to choose between the labs with real data or simulations-generated data will be discussed. I will touch upon the challenges and successes of running the live lab sessions on teleconferencing platforms such as Zoom. Some elements, like pre-recorded introductions to the labs, methods of lab reports collections and grading online will be useful well past the pandemic.

Lessons from Virtual Laboratories

Material properties such as pressure, tension, conductivity and elasticity arise due to the complex interactions of atoms and electrons.&nbsp; Interaction forces such as friction also have atomistic origins.&nbsp; Our textbooks may mention these ideas in advanced topic boxes, but what do you say when a student wants to know more?&nbsp; In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the field of condensed matter physics.&nbsp; I will describe how condensed matter physics is present not only in our physics curriculum, but in daily life in technologies such as semiconductors, fiber optics, light-emitting diodes (LED’s), and liquid crystals.&nbsp; The talk is intended for anyone who teaches introductory physics, from college physics to secondary science teachers -- both high school and middle school.

Condensed Matter Physics in Introductory Physics: Hiding in Plain Sight

Young students are often enamored by the promise of exotic fundamental discoveries in the field of high-energy particle physics. Unfortunately, it is less often that I meet a young student who sees condensed matter physics in the same light. To help inspire more students to pursue condensed matter, I’ll start by illustrating how both fields (condensed matter and high-energy) are at the frontier of fundamental understanding. There is a fruitful exchange of theoretical concepts and theoretical techniques between the two fields. Then, I'll highlight a few condensed matter experimental systems, from my lab, and from colleagues at other universities. The common theme will be exotic phases of matter that arise when strongly interacting electrons dance with each other: in carbon nanotubes, in graphene, and at the interface between&nbsp;semiconductors and superconductors. This talk is intended for anyone who teaches introductory physics, from high school to college.

Condensed Matter Experiments that Use Strongly Interacting Electrons

Brown et al. (1) demonstrated that explicitly incentivizing students in quantum mechanics to correct their mistakes on midterm problems assists students on improving their performance on the same problems as featured on a final exam. We discuss a similar investigation into a first-semester upper-division electromagnetism course, taught at a large research university in the Mountain West, in which 25 students were similarly given explicit incentives to rework three unit exam problems (one for each of three unit exams). For each problem, we compare students who chose to rework their errors for credit with students who did not. We discuss initial findings as follows: for one of the three problems, the explicit incentivization shows a statistically significant benefit for students who accepted the incentive. For the other two problems, certain issues (e.g. an unexpected ceiling effect on midterm attempts) are discussed in terms of affecting outcomes.

Evaluating Explicit Incentives to Correct Mistakes in Upper-Division Electromagnetism

Research-based instructional strategies (RBIS) have been proven effective in improving student learning gains and in reducing course drop rates. Unfortunately, these strategies are not the norm for many physics departments. Studies indicate that some 1/3 of instructors who try RBIS discontinue the use, perhaps because the RBIS were not seen as successful or were viewed as too time consuming. One possible remedy is to have faculty looking to try RBIS co-teach with instructors who’ve previously used these strategies. We will report on our experiences flipping an upper-level quantum mechanics course working with just such a model. We believe this approach could increase the number of instructors who decide to try RBIS as well as increase the probability that these first attempts will lead to further use.

Who Flipped Our Class?

Introductory quantum mechanics can be challenging to students because many concepts are nonintuitive and the development of quantum intuition faces numerous hurdles. One important pathway to developing such intuition through problem-solving is limited due to the fact that few time-independent problems, and virtually no time-dependent problems, are analytically solvable. Computational modeling, however, can be an effective, complementary pathway to developing quantum insight and deepening conceptual understanding. In this presentation we will discuss computation in introductory quantum mechanics with examples to enhance student learning and active engagement (see http://www.faculty.umassd.edu/j.wang/ for some examples).

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