United States

We demonstrate how freely-available, cloud-based, IBM quantum hardware can be used to perform several types of quantum dynamics simulations. Though current devices are far from capable of tackling truly difficult problems which cannot be attacked classically, these noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices are ideally suited for investigating quantum dynamics in small systems. Simulations of one or two spins with fairly arbitrary interactions and external fields are shown to agree well with theory, but even a system consisting of three spins is shown to be quite difficult to simulate due to noise and errors. These investigations are shown to be well-suited as a computational and experimental supplement to the standard undergraduate quantum mechanics curriculum.

AAPT SM 22

Simulating quantum dynamics with IBM quantum computers

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.


AAPT SM 20

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. 

technical paper

AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques. Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.



Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is an instructional strategy involving feedback from students on pre-lecture activities in order to design in-class activities to build on the feedback. We investigate the effectiveness of a JiTT approach, which included in-class concept tests using clickers, in an upper-division quantum mechanics course. We analyze student performance on pre-lecture reading quizzes and in-class clicker questions answered individually and then again after group discussion and compare those performances with open-ended retention quizzes administered after completing instruction on the concepts. In general, compared to the reading quizzes, student performance improved when individual clicker questions were posed after lectures that focused on students' identified difficulties. The performance on the clicker questions after group discussions following individual clicker question responses also improved, as did the performance on retention quizzes administered at a later time. We discuss some possible reasons for the improved performance at various stages of instruction.

Impact of pre-class reading and peer instruction in quantum mechanics

A feeling of isolation can contribute to leaks in the pipeline. Being “the only one” certainly leads to a sense of isolation, whether as a woman, as a racial minority, or as the sole physics instructor in the institution. Sixty percent of two-year colleges (TYCs) that offer physics classes have no or one full-time physics instructor (aip.org/statistics). Isolation is a critical issue for physics faculty at TYCs, and for both full-time and part-time instructors. This is even more critical in the era of COVID. Isolation for TYC physics faculty may be mitigated by creating virtual-meeting mentorship groups. In this presentation, I will share the development and implementation of a pilot project for TYC physics faculty, adapted from the e-Alliance mutual mentorship program for women in physics.

Using Mutual Mentoring to Mitigate Isolation for TYC Physics Faculty

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty members have faced a changed and challenging environment. They were faced with reallocating their time across various teaching, research, and service responsibilities; adjusting their teaching format, testing, and labs; and dealing with reduced access to the resources they needed to teach and/or conduct research, all while trying to maintain the quality of their work and personal well-being. Using data from the American Institute of Physics’ Statistical Research Center 2021 Faculty Member Survey, we will dissect some of these changes and discuss how they may (or many not) vary based on faculty members’ gender identity and parenting status.

Faculty Members’ Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Using data from the American Institute of Physics’ Statistical Research Center 2011-12 Survey of Physics in Two-Year Colleges, we will look back at various facets of diversity in physics in two-year colleges including students and faculty members (people), academic units (places), and variety in course offerings (pedagogy). Using more recent data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS), we will examine trends in two-year college student diversity since 2012. In addition, using data from College Board, we will explore the impact of the pandemic on enrollments and retention for students at two- and four-year colleges.

Diversity in Physics in TYCs: People, Places, and Pedagogy

The focus of the NEBP is to broaden participation of STEM learners by immersing teams from a wide range of higher education institutions in an innovative NASA-mission-like adventure in data acquisition and analysis through scientific ballooning during the 10/14/2023 annular and 4/8/2024 total solar eclipses. NEBP will engage 85 teams in equitable, inclusive learning on two primary tracks: 1) atmospheric science and 2) engineering. Engaging 85 teams spread across the country will be a challenge. The teams will be from a variety of college types, the students will have different background knowledge levels, and the available mentoring will vary. To meet these challenges, the teams will be divided into ten geographic pods, five for each track. Each pod has a Pod Lead who will create a cohesive community with their 8-10 teams. This talk will describe how NEBP will engage the student participants, both at the pod level and nationally.

Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project: Approaches for Guiding Student Learning

Lighter-than-air ballooning ranges from flame-carrying “sky lanterns” (not a recommended activity) that have been flown for centuries, to the earliest balloon flights carrying people in 1783, to the largest flying vehicles – the amazing airships from the decades before WWII, to rubber and mylar “party” balloons, to tourist-carrying hot-air balloons, to home-built solar balloons, to pico-balloons capable of circumnavigating the earth (multiple times!), to latex-rubber weather balloons, zero-pressure balloons, and super-pressure balloons capable of carrying curricular and research payloads into the stratosphere. Lighter-than-air ballooning provides a context for students of all ages to study aviation history and to do many engaging STEM lessons ranging from studying buoyancy and the properties of lifting gases, to measuring the extreme conditions of the atmosphere and studying weather/climate, to predicting balloon trajectories and tracking flights, to building and operating “near-space” vehicles, to doing photography and remote sensing, to programming microcontrollers and analyzing sensor data.

Overview of Educational Applications of Lighter-Than-Air Ballooning

How physics and astronomy is presented to K-12 students can help determine how they declare their academic major in college. Students tend to declare their major based on personal, interpersonal, or practical reasons. This talk will focus on how students can see themselves at your institution, how undergraduate clubs can retain them once they are there, and the tools that the Society of Physics Students can offer to help inspire and reinforce K-12 students’ interest in physics and astronomy. This pragmatic talk will outline steps you can take to connect them to physics and astronomy and be their academic choice in college.

Inspiring the Next Generation of Students in Physics and Astronomy

Logistic regression and random forest classification models were used to predict students at risk of receiving a failing grade (D or F) in an introductory mechanics class (N = 2061 students). The dataset consisted of both institutional and in-class variables gathered from the first two weeks of instruction, with the in-class variables (homework and clicker scores) found to be particularly important for the model’s classification accuracy. Additional methods such as model regularization and upsampling of the failing class through the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) were found to slightly improve model performance. The best performing models achieved a balanced accuracy of around 80%. An apparent performance ceiling of around 87% was found by providing the model with the course test average, indicating that substantially increasing performance above 80% is unlikely with data available early in the semester.

Using Machine Learning to Predict Student Performance in Introductory Mechanics

In this study we examine the impacts of elements of an advanced physics lab on a student’s self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to perform a certain task. This has been studied in introductory physics courses and introductory physics labs, examining changes in a student’s self-efficacy based on aspects of course design and student interactions. The advanced physics lab offers a new arena in which to investigate these changes. While students are all majoring in physics, there is significant variation between students in their confidence in their abilities. In addition, their experimental design and execution skills are typically not developed at the start of the course. We will discuss how the use of particular course elements change a student’s self-efficacy and make recommendations based on our results.

Development of Self-Efficacy in an Advanced Physics Lab

Some university physics students volunteer in informal physics programs like youth camps, demo shows, and public lectures. These experiences help physics student volunteers to build connections with faculty and their peers, connect their formal learning to the real world, and support their physics identity. These experiences can also influence the career pathways of their participants. Here, we examine the career experiences of alumni who had volunteered in informal physics as students and have since gone on to become informal physics program leaders. By looking at this subgroup, we hypothesize that program leaders had some impactful informal physics experiences that led them to careers in informal education. We can use this as an initial step to understanding the commonalities in experiences for volunteers more broadly. The resulting themes could be of use to practitioners in better understanding and improving their own programs.

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Impact of pre-class reading and peer instruction in quantum mechanics

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