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Like many institutions during Spring 2020, our university quickly switched to online instruction, and we will share our experiences. We wrestled with how to turn the remaining labs into online labs and tried different methods in our Introductory Physics 1 and Physics 2 Labs. We also deliberated on whether or not to reduce the number of labs required for the semester and how to keep the Teaching Assistants employed. Additionally, we made plans to improve the quality of our online labs in the possibility of a return to virtual instruction in the Fall 2020 semester.

AAPT SM 20

Online Introductory Physics Labs During Covid-19

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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.


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. 

This talk describes some events designed to share culture among students and faculty. In order to enhance the participation of women and minoritized students and to elevate the experiences of all students, we must find ways to allow students to bring their whole selves into their studies. The illusion that Physics has no culture is damaging especially those who do not feel welcome. By discussing culture and sharing our culture we can strengthen connections between students and faculty.

Cultural Exchange Events

Given the development of the Covid-19 global pandemic during the Spring semester of 2020, proctoring an in person, comprehensive, written final was no longer an option. While I considered the alternatives, I began to question the learning goals of the course and the value of a traditional final exam. I want my students to continue to think about the course material outside the classroom, to gain a deeper appreciation of the subject, and to reflect on the course as a meaningful and influential life experience. To bring meaning, there must be elements of community, civic responsibility, and personal growth. To that end, students were matched with local seniors, those more vulnerable to loneliness due to the pandemic. They met with their senior via Zoom to discuss connections between course material and the current social, economic, and political context as well as the current coronavirus pandemic and public health in general.

Covid-19: An Opportunity to Drive the Undergraduate Introductory Physics Curriculum toward Change

Classes with multiple teachers is a challenging way for teaching science. The hard part is, teachers have mostly chosen their teaching styles, and blending teaching styles after years of development can be daunting. This limits opportunities to try new approaches. However, co-teaching provides the opportunity to teach with different approaches and group work strategies, which can be a little hard but exciting. We decided to follow the same lesson plans, lab tools, quizzes and grading strategy for three introductory calculus-based mechanics classes for one quarter, including combining the classes in our Learning Management System, Canvas. We were all equally responsible as the course instructor in our in-class instruction and our online presence as well. In this experience, we improved our teaching and collaboration skills and students learned how to engage in co-taught a class with many students and multiple teachers.

Co-teaching an Introductory Mechanics Course; An Opportunity to Teach or Learn?

Many studies have shown that engaging students in the learning process increases their attention and focus, motivates them to practice higher level critical thinking skills, and promotes meaningful learning experiences. In this talk, I will share a way that I engage the students in the classroom setting and with online instruction using free a online tool called Quizziz. Quizizz is a free tool. It works on almost any device or web browser. You can access hundreds of learning quizzes that other instructors have created or you can create your own. This is a great way to promote student engagement and fun competitive learning especially when teaching online.

Engaging Physics Students with Quizizz

Building on prior analyses of how introductory physics experiences affect student attitudes, preliminary evidence suggests that IPLS students, more so than their counterparts in traditional introductory physics courses, express the attitude that physics is relevant to their primary biological interests. We report on the durability of these attitudes. We present results from interdisciplinary attitude surveys given to students a year (or more) after their initial experience in IPLS, as well as immediately after that experience. By tracking the evolution of student attitudes over time, we assess whether attitude improvements due to IPLS are in fact stable and long-lasting. We also explore how students’ subsequent coursework in biology or other disciplines may influence these attitudes.

Exploring the Durability of Student Attitudes Toward Interdisciplinarity

During the anthropogenic disaster of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID19), all courses at universities across the country switched to online modalities mid-semester. At the University of Nebraska Omaha, we have used the Communities of Inquiry (COI) framework as the basis for recreating the interplay between instructor, content, and student presence present in the reformed versions of our face-to-face introductory physics courses. In this presentation, we discuss the COI, the various types of important interactions necessary for high-impact instruction, and specifics on recreating these interactions online for a physics course including a laboratory component. We also present preliminary results showing no significant decrease in student learning resulting from the mid-semester change of format.

Communities of Inquiry: Recreating Important Learner Interactions in Online Courses

Interpreting and understanding the way students use and understand the mathematics used in physics is a central theme in Physics Education Research. Physical phenomena described by partial differential equations (PDEs) provide a promising context to study how students combine physics and mathematics. An example is the description of heat flow and temperature distribution in a one-dimensional rod, which can be described by the (1D) heat equation, together with an initial condition (IC), and boundary conditions (BCs). In this contribution, we present data from an interview study where we gave students the mathematical description of a system (PDE, IC and BCs) together with the analytical solution. We asked to describe the time evolution of the system, both in mathematical and physical terms. Our analysis shows that students’ reasoning is mainly mathematical with little reference to the underlying physics and that most students do not connect their mathematical statements to physical processes.

Technical-Vocational Education (TVE) Students’ Mental Models about Electric Circuits

Undergraduate physics students are often required to take a course in computational methods. I will describe an approach to presenting this course in a flipped format. The background lecture for each topic are moved outside of the classroom, in the form of YouTube videos embedded in interactive Jupyter notebooks. A Jupyter notebook is an open-source web application that combines formatted text, executable code, images, videos, and interactive widgets. A plugin for the notebook, called nbgrader, provides for automated grading of coded assignments. In class, students work in small groups to complete programming challenges, applying the techniques described in the videos. The first two assignments each week included built in automated tests, while the more challenging third assignment does not. This approach provides students with immediate feedback as they develop their coding skills, while also encouraging them to think of ways to debug their own code. Students also complete two larger group projects in place of a midterm and final exam. Surveys of student attitudes showed a preference for the flipped presentation when compared to a traditional section of the course, while learning outcomes were equivalent.

Teaching Computational Methods in a Flipped Format

The essence of laboratory experiences is the gathering of data, analyzing data, forming hypotheses, comparing with models and theories, discussion sources of and estimating statistical and systematic uncertainties, and drawing conclusions, usually in the form of a lab report. All of these components have been replicated in a complete set of first- and second-semester laboratory online experiments at Michigan State University, which can be used to enable undergraduate students to obtain authentic laboratory experiences while staying off campus. The availability of these online labs is crucial, even in universities planning to resume on-campus teaching in the fall, because groups of students in high risk groups need accommodations to remain sheltered during the pandemic. All of these experiments do not need special software, can be run on a web-browser on any computer, tablet device, or even smartphone, and in this way do not contribute to widening the digital divide.

Hands-on Lab Experiences With Social Distancing

Numerical modeling is used extensively in astrophysics and -- when used in a classroom -- allows students to explore how models are built in physics in general and how model building is facilitated by computational methods in particular. It also exposes them to ubiquitous tools such as Python and Runge-Kutta. Using a relatively simple N-body simulation students are able to go beyond the usual Kepler's Third law introductory descriptions of orbital dynamics and examine 3-body and chaos effects. I will show some cases where students encounter questions which are central to the current state-of-the-art in planetary dynamics research.

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