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Benjamin Franklin was a first-rate physicist. Yet, his experiments and demonstrations almost killed him several times, and once even shocked him completely unconscious. Valiantly carrying on, Franklin was the de facto founder of the science of electricity and even a publishing member of the Royal Society of London. In this talk, allow me to introduce you to Benjamin Franklin the Physicist as I outline his most important and dangerous discoveries, demonstrate them, and explain why the heck he thought that positive charge flowed in conductors.

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Benjamin Franklin’s Most Dangerous Experiments

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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

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AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

Winter and Summer National Meetings:
These National Meetings, held each winter and summer, are opportunities for members, colleagues, and future physicists from around the world to:

- participate in physics workshops
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- engage exhibitors and learn about the latest physics resources
- discuss innovations in teaching methods
- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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The evolution of NGSS standards and the influence this has had at the HS level has created an important inflection point nationally for&nbsp;new innovation and policy about how we can integrate engineering&nbsp;and design, not just in science, but across entire campuses.&nbsp;Four years&nbsp;ago, the&nbsp;creation of the&nbsp;MakerDen at Ramona Convent Secondary School (the first all-girls makerspace in Southern California)&nbsp;allowed for a&nbsp;transformational&nbsp;change in&nbsp;not only how&nbsp;students,&nbsp;but teachers across all disciplines, integrate engineering skills.&nbsp;The&nbsp;goal&nbsp;was to&nbsp;create&nbsp;policies and procedures&nbsp;that allowed for the&nbsp;building&nbsp;of a&nbsp;new community of collaboration between teachers&nbsp;in&nbsp;an&nbsp;innovative&nbsp;shared physical space. This is a story of collaboration, stake holder engagement, empowering&nbsp;community, and then giving up control to let it thrive. The creation of this fertile soil resulted in the MakerDen being featured at the 2019 International Symp. of Academic Makerspace at Yale.

Freedom, Innovation, and Makerspaces; creating new campus realities.

Most teachers of general physics and other physics courses have been dismayed by the rampant student use of and dependence upon online homework solutions.&nbsp; I have developed a “5-Star Rating,” done by students, to indicate&nbsp;use, or no use, of online solutions in the solving of physics homework problems.&nbsp; A 5-star problem can be achieved if you can work a problem without use of the book, notes, or other people.&nbsp; Or, you can work your way down to a 0-Star problem utterly copying without understanding.&nbsp; The emphasis is on honesty and integrity.&nbsp; If students use&nbsp;an online solution, they must reference it!&nbsp; If someone else helps, give them credit!&nbsp; One’s homework grade is not reduced by star-rating the problem.&nbsp; In fact, a small bit of extra credit is awarded should a student use 5-Star Rating. &nbsp;&nbsp;The 5-Star Rating system and possible correlations between 5-Star Rating and performance will be discussed.

"5-Star" Student Self-Assessment for Online Homework Solutions in General Physics

Promoting engagement in large synchronous sessions can be challenging, particularly for educators who are not used to working in the online format. Students are reluctant to engage in large-format online groups, leaving online synchronous sessions feeling passive. Community-engaged online performers, or streamers, have developed techniques for promoting interest and engagement from a text-based “chat” of viewers. If our goal is to promote engagement with online synchronous class content, this contemporary entertainment medium offers relevant and timely examples of promoting interactivity in a remote synchronous format. These solutions can range from technological add-ons to active engagement techniques that are adaptable to educational technology and active learning. This paper will present techniques, case studies, and examples of application to a remote introductory physics course.

A in the Chat: Remote Engagement Inspiration from Streaming Culture

The Physics and Everyday Thinking Curriculum is built around students talking and working together. In the classroom groups have white boards and the instructor circulates to monitor work and ask questions. In online environments, an instructor can only be present with one group at a time, and an instructor showing up in a breakout room can disrupt the student-student discussions. Providing groups with shared documents, virtual whiteboards and other collaboration tools not only makes their group work more productive, it also provides a way for the instructor to unobtrusively monitor multiple groups simultaneously. In this talk we will present a variety of tools we have used from the Google Suite as well as our experience using Microsoft Teams. This is part of a series of talks stemming from the NextGen PET FOLC project. &nbsp;This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant NSF DUE-1626496.

Tools to Support On-line Small Group Activities

Equal access to lucrative careers depends on every student being exposed to coding and science courses are prime territory for this task. Jupyter, Binder, and Colab have been critical tools for making that happen. They’re free, used in research, and enable non-CS-fluent instructors to give their students meaningful exposure to introductory programming and data science. &nbsp; I’ll share lessons learned from helping school districts embed coding activities into core science curriculum for over 15,000 middle schoolers annually. I’ll also report more recent developments using this strategy in remote physics courses at the 2nd largest US university and in Quarknet’s Data Camp for high school teachers.

Teaching Science Content with Jupyter at Scale, Elementary Through University

This summer provided an opportunity to innovate amid the pandemic. Andrews University’s Department of Physics developed an entire series of labs that were completed with equipment that was cheap enough to supply to each student. Pre-recorded lectures were combined with remote, concurrent small-group learning assignments and laboratory exercises to reach students in our summer intensive physics course with the largest ever enrollment. A real laboratory experience, while being away from campus combined with easy access to professors increased student engagement.

An accelerated physics course remotely with SGLs and physical labs.

It is well known that in his pursuit of “ Cosmic Harmony ,” Johannes Kepler believed that the planets were singing musical scales as the speeds of their orbits varied. In no small part because of his Laws of Planetary motion , we now know that these varying speeds are due to orbital eccentricities. It turns out that the eccentricity of the orbit of each planet known in Kepler’s time can be used to calculate the numerical frequency-ratio for the musical interval spanned by the scale Kepler believed each planet was singing. This talk will provide some background on&nbsp;&nbsp;Kepler’s ideas about “Cosmic Harmony,” the mathematics of musical intervals and scales and describe the derivation of the expression used and report the results.

Kepler’s Cosmic Harmony, Orbital Eccentricities & Musical Intervals

Teaching astronomy remotely is a challenge. While many activities and programs are available on-line, students are not guaranteed to have the needed Internet access or bandwidth. Active learning also becomes a problem if students cannot interact with fellow students or instructors in person. A modern version of an ancient instrument called the astrolabe can be used for several backyard projects, from analzying the orbit of the Moon to the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. We show how to construct and use an astrolabe and discuss potential lessons.&nbsp;

Backyard Astronomy during a Pandemic

Even before the current pandemic, astronomy labs at Saint Anselm College had to plan for the many cloudy nights that would prevent a trip to the observatory. In the fall semester of 2019, the indoor lab component centered around the educational video game, “At Play in the Cosmos,” which lets students simulate performing astronomical measurements from their spaceship. This was incorporated into the labs using spectral tubes and simulations to introduce new concepts before they came up in the game. With the shift to online learning in 2020, the video game became the centerpiece of the labs once again, providing the students with guidance that is not available in an asynchronous teaching environment. In this session, I’ll share some of the techniques used to assess student learning with the video game in the lab and online.

Cloudy Night? Astronomy Labs Using Physics Demonstrations and a Videogame

As one of the oldest sciences taught, astronomy penetrates to all aspects of society:&nbsp; science, culture, religion, timekeeping, and exploration.&nbsp; And the topic coverage in the domain of astronomy is grand, the entire universe in fact.&nbsp; In this sense, there could be a whole lot to memorize as a novice astronomy student. In fact, there is so much material one could memorize, that an effective astronomy class should probably have a highly constrained amount of memorization at all because,&nbsp; at its very essence, astronomy is not something you memorize, astronomy is something you do.&nbsp; In short astronomy is a verb.&nbsp; The folk wisdom of how to teach astronomy as a culture-encompassing science that is action oriented has been developed over many generations, but by and large that wisdom gets lost. AstroNotes is decades long archive of the collected wisdom for teaching astronomy as something students do rather than memorize.

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