United States

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

AAPT WM 21

&quot;5-Star&quot; Student Self-Assessment for Online Homework Solutions in General Physics

integrity

honesty

cheating

5-star

on-line solutions

physics

homework

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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

technical paper

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.

AstroNotes: Where Astronomy is a Verb

Scientific researchers across all disciplines are routinely faced with ethical dilemmas in their work. To help strengthen their ethical reasoning skills, they are encouraged to take online training programs (e.g. CITI program, the Office of Research Integrity’s “The Lab”). We argue that these programs will be more effective if they are better aligned with how working scientists think about these dilemmas. The main goal of this study is to investigate how research professors think about ethical issues in their own work. In this study, we interviewed fifteen scientists from several disciplines asking how they conduct their research and then presented several different case studies involving ethical dilemmas. We analyze these interviews by focusing on the goals and values the scientists express in their ethical reasoning about these cases. This work will inform future development of ethics education programs.

Scientists Views on Ethics in their Research

In the Spring of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many colleges and universities transitioned to a new modality of teaching that we refer to as `emergency remote teaching' (ERT). As ERT is likely to continue through the Spring of 2021, we seek to learn about the student experience with ERT in order to better inform ERT instruction. Building from student responses to a survey administered in the Spring of 2020, in this talk we discuss the development of and student responses to a new ERT survey administered in the Fall of 2020 and sent to hundreds of physics departments across the US. We asked students to share their experiences with lectures, labs, exams, and other elements ERT in their physics courses to hear from students about what worked well (and what didn’t), and what got better since ERT in the Spring (and what got worse).

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