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Surface charges direct the flow of current through conductors. In anthropomorphic terms, they tell the current where to go and where not to go. As acknowledged by Professors Griffiths, Jackson, and Chabay and Sherwood, surface charges have been difficult to calculate. This paper presents a new way to calculate surface charges in which the surface of the conductor is covered with pixels which hold the surface charge. The pixels (referred to as &quot;sensing pixels&quot;) sense the electric fields produced by all the other charges in the system and adjust their internal charge until steady state is reached. Importantly, sensing pixels allow students (and researchers) to understand why surface charge distributions, however calculated, look the way they do by asking the simple question: &quot;What would a sensing pixel sense?&quot; As Professor Sherwood kindly wrote to the author, this can make such counterintuitive phenomena as the accumulation of charges at edges, intuitive.

AAPT SM 21

Surface Charges from a Sensing Pixel Perspective

sensing pixels

surface charges

current-carrying conductor

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MH 21 is arranged around 6 themes that focus attention on pressing needs that should be addressed to enhance the well-being of communities and provide a forum for presenting breakthrough discoveries.

Surface charges direct the flow of current through conductors. In anthropomorphic terms, they tell the current where to go and where not to go. As acknowledged by Professors Griffiths, Jackson, and Chabay and Sherwood, surface charges have been difficult to calculate. This paper presents a new way to calculate surface charges in which the surface of the conductor is covered with pixels which hold the surface charge. The pixels (referred to as "sensing pixels") sense the electric fields produced by all the other charges in the system and adjust their internal charge until steady state is reached. Importantly, sensing pixels allow students (and researchers) to understand why surface charge distributions, however calculated, look the way they do by asking the simple question: "What would a sensing pixel sense?" As Professor Sherwood kindly wrote to the author, this can make such counterintuitive phenomena as the accumulation of charges at edges, intuitive.

technical paper

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In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the need for inclusive physics curricula to help address the lack of diversity and representation in the field. Integrating social issues into the physics curriculum has the potential to “change the culture of science to be more welcoming and inclusive” by broadening the cultural contexts in which scientific knowledge is created and science is practiced.

In this presentation, I will discuss a multi-week course assignment for which students were required to read the book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, and to respond to the scientific and social issues in the story. Kamkwamba’s autobiographical narrative of his innovative construction of a windmill is suffused with introductory physics concepts embedded in an intense social context of poverty, famine, deforestation and climate change in his native Malawi. The talk will discuss details of the project as well as student attitudes and responses to the assignment.

Integrating Science and Social Issues in the Introductory Physics Curriculum

I will report on my experiences in promoting student storytelling of the lives of physicists as part of course requirements in lower and upper division college physics courses. The primary objective was to motivate and expand the understanding of physics beyond the concepts and equations by contextualizing discoveries and understanding what motivated the study of physics in the lives of real people. Students are required to dig into the lives of physicists and unusual historical or contextual situations encountered in their lives and discoveries and relate stories they find interesting. A special effort was made to promote story-telling of the background and contributions of women and minorities in physics. Students also learned vital skills in producing short youtube videos up to 5 minutes long. I will report on student responses and reactions to this effort, based on general observations and results of blind surveys.


Student Storytelling of Physicist Profiles to Promote Physics and Diversity

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been the subject of a growing body of psychological and recently, neurological research. The majority of this research has been behavioral and deficit-oriented, focused on “coping” and ways of controlling ADHD behavior to function within institutional norms. This focus persists despite compelling evidence that physiological variations are responsible for ADHD behavior, over which “control” is limited and institutional “functionality” becomes discriminatory. This is evidenced by the lack of scientific works examining ADHD from a positive perspective. In this study, we analyze interviews of STEM students and faculty at Texas State University (a large Hispanic-Serving Institution) who have been diagnosed with ADHD. These interviews will explore learner variability based on interviewees’ experiences in STEM fields, and their perceptions of personal strengths that may be unique to their variant neurobiology and/or their life experience as members of a marginalized academic group.


Strength-based analysis of experiences of physics students with ADHD

This talk focuses on the various methods one can use to produce physics demo videos, with many hints and much advice. Also, storage and dissmemination of such videos is discussed.

Virtual Physics Demonstration Videos-A Primer

Science outreach is an international phenomenon. I have had the privilege of being a part of Science Festivals in various countries in the EU, and through those festivals, witnessed and interacted with other incredible science presenters from around the world. At a science festival in Slovenia, the organizers have a special session called Show It to Others, where the invited presenters have 5 minutes to share something they have created to demonstrate science with the other presenters. Given that this talk is being done remotely, I have asked my international colleagues to become part of this remote presentation and submit to me, a short description of their program that also features an example of their work. I am excited to share a glimpse of these creative presenters to the AAPT membership.



Show it to U.S.

How can you successfully deliver community STEM outreach when face-to-face opportunities are limited? And how can you best support the most vulnerable and underrepresented members of your community through virtual STEM education?

During this talk, you will hear of our experiences in adapting our existing outreach programmes and crafting new virtual programmes to suit the evolving educational needs of young people in Leicester, as well as our recommendations for effectively utilising virtual STEM engagement for years to come.

STEM Through the Screen: Experiences of adapting community outreach

Instead of written homework, I collect videos of students doing and explaining their work. I'll talk about why I do this, the value of seeing the process in addition to the product, and the logistical problems and solutions I've come across. I do this for small and big classes, lectures and labs, theory and coding. The biggest upsides are a much better understanding of the students' understanding along with a dramatic reduction in cheating. Typical videos are 3-5 minutes in length and I watch them at double speed. This allows me to grade up to 1000 videos per class per semester.

The value and logistics of student-submitted videos for homework

The Classical Mechanics course taught at BC in Fall 2020 used a hybrid of model of class instruction, combining students learning remotely and students attending in person into a single synchronous class. Past offerings of this course used hands-on lab experiments to engage students in mathematical modeling of oscillators and other mechanics topics. To give all the learners a uniform experience, lab experiments in 2020 were replaced with group video analysis projects, integrating lecture, experiment, and computation. The videos were used to scaffold increasingly nuanced computational models. For example, for oscillations, student videos of everyday objects oscillating were solicited and exploited as a “hook” to introduce modeling of undamped springs, and the discrepancies between theory and experiment were used to motivate damped models. This structure was inspired by Brian Lane’s “Capture, Code, Compare” activities.

Labs in Intermediate Mechanics: Combining Student-Made Videos with Computational Modeling

This talk provides an introduction to the mission, features, and types of articles in the American Journal of Physics with a goal of helping potential authors understand how to prepare a submission.

Publishing in the American Journal of Physics

Visual pop culture has been employed for physics education because novel examples from visual pop culture can capture students’ attention. Although widely enjoyed by people around the world, Japanese animation (Anime) has been used less frequently than other types of visual pop culture. In this presentation about our recent paper published in “The Physics Teachers”, we introduce how Anime examples can be used to teach fluid mechanics concepts including buoyant force, drag, lift, and key dimensionless numbers such as Reynolds number. This approach was employed in an undergraduate-level fluid mechanics class, and many students were positive about using Anime for teaching fluid mechanics because the examples provided a break from the normal methods of teaching and students were more engaged with the content that they learned. Therefore, Anime has the rich potential as a source of instructional examples that illustrate concepts from fluid mechanics and other areas of physics.

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Surface Charges from a Sensing Pixel Perspective

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