United States

Amazon Prime&#39;s much-anticipated television adaptation of The Wheel of Time book series premiered in November 2021. The series is based on broadly acclaimed source material and features a talented and diverse cast and writing staff. With a market continuing to demand high-fantasy entertainment, the show is expected to entertain for years to come. This premiere also presents an opportunity for physics educators to engage with students, as the original series author, the late Robert Jordan, majored in physics and consistently incorporated his physics background into the story’s setting. I review some of the history of this series and outline thoughts for how we might use this material to engage our students in discussion of physics concepts and representation in the physics community.

AAPT WM 22

Engaging Physics Students with The Wheel of Time

physics in media

This meeting is a great opportunity to explore sessions and workshops designed with your professional development in mind. Present your research and exchange ideas on the latest in teaching and pedagogy. Participate in a wide range of events, activities, plenaries, and so much more, connecting you with peers and colleagues who share your commitment to excellence in physics education.

Amazon Prime's much-anticipated television adaptation of The Wheel of Time book series premiered in November 2021. The series is based on broadly acclaimed source material and features a talented and diverse cast and writing staff. With a market continuing to demand high-fantasy entertainment, the show is expected to entertain for years to come. This premiere also presents an opportunity for physics educators to engage with students, as the original series author, the late Robert Jordan, majored in physics and consistently incorporated his physics background into the story’s setting. I review some of the history of this series and outline thoughts for how we might use this material to engage our students in discussion of physics concepts and representation in the physics community.

technical paper

Here is an opportunity to build two modular Origami structures, an Octahedral Skeleton (OS) and a turbine. You will need 12 square sheets of paper. The OS represents 3D space, and the turbine can be used to practice rotational motion physics. The second goal is having conversations about framing, as it relates to attracting students to physics and supporting them in physics. For over a decade I have used paper model building to guide learning Physics and Mathematics. In classes for students with majors other than the sciences we use paper to learn physics concepts, skills, and work on design and Art. Teaching an Origami Science class online led to my use of GIFs for instruction. In the GIFs paper in 2D danced into a final 3D object. This dance inspired paper choreography framing of teaching and learning physics. Many students take the class to fold, and endup doing physics.

Paper Choreography Framing of Learning and Teaching Physics

In our modern society, science and art are often perceived as unrelated endeavors. However, the idea that artistic creativity and imagination can play an important role in natural sciences and engineering is finally gaining an acceptance. One of the big questions about the connection between art and science is what features make the work of art look realistic. Questions like this open the dialog between physicists and a public. For example, examining paintings, drawings, and photographs can be used to demonstrate the laws of optics. The presentation will demonstrate how the understanding of basic optics phenomena such as an absorption, scattering, reflection, refraction, diffraction, and polarization of light, is absolutely essential for creating realistic-looking paintings and drawings. Using arts in science and engineering education and outreach has a potential to attract and captivate the new audiences.

Harnessing Visual Arts to Teach About The Light And Color

Columbia College Chicago specializes in arts and media disciplines, and as a result, our most popular physics classes are "The Science of Acoustics" and "Science of Musical Instruments." Also, I have taught a course called "Physics for Filmmakers" (1) for over a decade where students create a final film project using topics and examples of their choice. I will discuss ideas from recent projects including some done over a recent remote term. I also will discuss plans to transition that course to a conceptual physics course which includes the best discussions and project prompts from "Filmmakers" but is also open to projects in music (2) and other forms of the arts.

Including art projects as part of physics courses

Logistic regression, random forest, and ensemble classification algorithms are used to predict students at risk of receiving a failing grade (D or F) in an introductory mechanics class. Institutional variables as well as student performance variables gathered from the first two weeks of class are used. Due to the imbalanced nature of the data, upsampling methods such as synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and alternative metrics such as balanced accuracy for evaluating model performance are examined. The importance of variables to the final classification is explored. The best performing models are found to achieve a balanced accuracy of around 80%.

Predicting At-Risk Students in Introductory Physics using Machine Learning

Over the last 25 years, educational researchers have encouraged practitioners to acknowledge and include culturally relevant pedagogy in physics learning. We examine current physics instructors’ views of objectivity in physics and their views of culturally relevant pedagogy. Instructors’ statements are analyzed using the conceptions of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) listed in Ladson-Billings’ (1995) framework: Conceptions of Self and Others, Conceptions of Knowledge, and Social Relations. We interviewed 11 physics instructors asking about their views towards CRP and objectivity in physics. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis. We share two illustrations of instructors who had strong Conceptions of Knowledge that supported CRP: they focus on the knowledge of physics as being constructed and reconstructed - now and into the future. Findings from our study indicate that the third conception, Conceptions of Knowledge, is crucial to develop if we want physics instructors to truly and effectively use CRP.

How Perceived Objectivity in Physics Impacts Cultural Relevance in Teaching

Student understanding of measurement uncertainty is a common learning goal among introductory physics lab courses. In this study, we investigate the open-ended responses to the Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) from students enrolled in the two-semester Design, Analysis, Tools, and Apprenticeship (DATA) Lab course at Michigan State University. Using an unsupervised natural language processing technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we were able to extract themes/topics from student responses to this assessment which were in line with the paradigms recently published by Pollard et al. The extracted themes from LDA were then compared to previously hand coded responses. Comparing the prevalence of the extracted topics to the frequencies of the hand-coded responses led to close agreement between the two analyses. Based on these results, topic modelling techniques may be able to provide insight into student understanding of measurement reasoning.

Investigating Open-Ended Responses to the PMQ using Natural Language Processing

The Learning Assistant Program is a relatively recent advancement in undergraduate education. The core tenet of the program aims to have undergraduate students use instructor-approved and research-backed group activities and discussions along with general peer support to encourage active participation in the course they assist in. Students requiring special accommodations make up a significant portion of students. In this poster, learning assistant anecdotes of interactions with these populations are presented. The use of learning assistants and dialogue between pertinent entities, the instructor, and the student as a means of allowing needed flexibility in these courses are explored. Sponsored by: Sujata Krishna, Ph.D.

Creating Connections

The Learning Assistant (LA) Program can be used as a pathway for students to develop pedagogical skills and gain independence in a variety of different learning environments. Here we describe the growth of a Physics LA over four semesters. Starting with a course in pedagogy along with the active facilitation of group learning, we can see the LA creating a strong foundation in their educational skills. Through diversity and inclusion trainings, the LA can start to cater to the different learning styles of students more effectively. As the LA becomes more adept in assisting students, they can take on more independent tasks like running discussion boards, providing exam reviews, and hosting office hours. After just four semesters, we can see the LA becoming self-sufficient in the classroom setting. Throughout their experience, the LA continually receives mentoring from professors and establishes rapport with peers of similar paths.

The Growth of a Physics Learning Assistant over Four Semesters

The Physics graduate program of Stony Brook University attracts students from diverse backgrounds, and involves a very intense workload right from the begining. This made it clear that it is necessary for the department to provide help in adapting to the environment, which led to the creation of a mentoring program. In the past three years, this program has undergone significant changes, the foremost being that it is heavily student-led. Besides faculty mentors, very active student mentors are assigned. This has formed a basis for improved communication between the incoming students and the department, with various benefits which range from success in making through the program requirements to overall mental health. In this talk, I will present the main characteristics and results, obtained through anonymous surveys, of this mentoring program. In the end, I will also discuss possible extensions of these methods to undergraduate programs in the US.

Students mentoring students eases diversity conversation and increases success rates

One of the broad concerns about the future of physics education research is a relative paucity of active PER groups at colleges and universities that are not primarily focused upon research. Yet, institutions that are primarily focused on teaching need to replicate these studies directly, whether to confirm that results at different university types are similar, or to identify differing outcomes that are connected to institutional type. Differences in institutional focus attract different student populations, and hence, different student motivations, which can directly affect data results from long-recognized quantitative and qualitative measuring instruments. This poster outlines a preliminary “lay of the land” view from the perspective of a solo PER researcher working at a regional comprehensive state university – both as an example of a non-research university and looking at other teaching-focused institution types – in order to determine the current outlook of PER’s growth outside the research university.

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