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Until recently, COVID-19 had forced most traditional colleges to switch from in-person physics labs to labs based on computer simulations and video analysis. At two-year colleges, online physics classes are a large fraction of the physics courses, with laboratory equipment requirements satisfied by commercial lab kits. These are expensive and of little use after the course ends. Building their labs at home with household materials created a less expensive, more engaging laboratory experience for our distance education students. Our students used prescription pill vials, braided fishing line, U.S. coins (as calibrated masses), rulers, and, of course, paper clips to build their experiments. Initially students were given detailed building instructions but more leeway with each succeeding experiment. The students showed ingenuity in building their experiments and enhanced course engagement. We will present examples of these experiments in this poster.

AAPT SM 22

Simple Home-built Laboratory Experiments for Remote Learning

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AAPT WM 21

poster

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As our society continues to venture into a newfound age of technology, educators must continuously adapt to the ever-changing lens through which students learn. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the need for such a paradigm shift has been made abundantly clear. The Smart Physics project aims to provide educators and students new ways of investigating the physical world through common sensors built into almost every smart device. These investigations can be performed in both traditional classroom settings and in asynchronous online courses. We analyze the way in which our team has gone from “board to screen” and follow the process of developing an investigation that can be conducted by students in introductory physics courses. Specifically, we look at the development of an investigation measuring the time intervals between the bounces of an object using an acoustic stopwatch in order to measure the energy lost through a series of inelastic collisions.

Smart Physics: Bouncing from the Board to the Screen

Collaboratively, we studied a project-based research methods course called STEM-199 at Mott Community College, taking observational fieldnotes, soliciting weekly student journal reflections, and interviewing students. In collaboration with the instructors, we identified themes across those data sources. The main theme we found was the prevalence and impact of instructor support for their students, emotionally, logistically, and technically. This support helped students develop a sense of resilience in the face of research difficulties in a class that was highly student-driven with students having high project ownership. We share lessons learned from the course to provide guidelines for other teachers, particularly at two-year colleges (TYCs). We focus on characterizing the key components of STEM-199 that helped the course run successfully at the TYC and could help a similar course work at other institutions; including: high teacher-student ratio; and student-driven projects with restrictions to limit the scope of instructor work.

Lessons Learned from Embedded Research Course at a Community College

Electric energy production and use affects every person in the USA, and teaching energy in high school physics should enable students to participate in public decision making about energy resources. In a large high school in a major metropolitan area, the “City of Berkland” project empowers students to be able to participate in future decisions about power production and use. After instruction in energy and electricity, the citizens of the (fictional) City of Berkland call a City Council meeting to discuss the possibility of a nuclear power plant in the city. “Residents” of the City of Berkland and surrounding areas argue for or against nuclear power in their city from the point of view of their position in the city and its environs. The project is highly engaging for students and supports them to connect their learning about electricity and energy to decisions that matter in their community.

Engaging students in energy learning by practicing community decision making

We investigated a new approach to physics curriculum focusing on student growth using interleaved practice. While the current physics curriculum focuses on the mastery of a single topic in a short time, we reorganized our curriculum to interleave several topics starting with basic conceptual questions and gradually increase the difficulty of problems students face throughout the semester. With early feedback from students taking a second-semester calculus-based physics class, we can show that the restructuring of the course has led students to become more confident in their problem-solving abilities and are more capable of long-term retention of material.

Reorganization of Physics Curriculum with a Focus on Student Growth

Like many other physics departments in recent years, we have worked to integrate computational activities into our physics curriculum. Our integration has focused on second-year physics courses, where we have adopted a centralized approach: The computational strand is interwoven through multiple courses and is administered independently of the course instructors. Our goal has been to provide regular, cohesive exposure of computation, contextualized to their courses, without overburdening any one course/instructor. We will present the structure of the computation exercises and their evolution, the coding assessment & feedback tool that we have developed, as well as student growth and reflections over the past four years.

A Multi-Course Integration of Computation into Our Physics Curriculum

Three-Dimensional Learning (3DL) is a framework that provides tools to help highlight what we want our students to be able to do with their knowledge. This framework creates opportunities for students to learn physics in sways authentic to the practice of science by aligning course content along 3 Dimensions: Scientific Practices that encompass what scientists do to explore phenomena, Core Ideas that underpin our discipline's central concepts, and Crosscutting Concepts that provide the lenses for how we view phenomena. Research into 3DL has shown that implementing the framework provides substantial benefits to student learning, but does take effort. With this poster, I will discuss how to use the 3 Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol as a tool for creating 3DL-aligned assessment items. I will share strategies to transforming existing problems and how to create 3D items from scratch, and where our data best suggests effort is most efficiently put.

Using 3 Dimensional Learning to Improve Student Learning on Assessments

How might we use breaks in physics classes to provide a meaningful experience, heighten cooperation and concentration, and provide more safety for kids on the way to school? We developed a Tactile Reaction Training that we call TReaT and can be embedded in physics classes without compromises to lab safety. The training is about ten minutes for each of them and focused on getting a better body feeling to react more appropriately in danger situations. Aspects of Germany‘s core curriculum in Physics, e.g. conservation of Momentum, Force and Motion is connected to the training. We tested the approach with 38 students of fifth and sixth grade over six weeks. For evaluation, we arrayed 10 students in a line across a marked lined that should resemble a train or bus stop. The kids who participated in TRT were significantly more often able to withstand the push and kept a safe stand.

Applying the Tactile Reaction Training TReaT in a Physics Classroom

Most introductory physics textbooks combine theory, applications, problem-solving, and history in a single volume, resulting in a hefty (and often expensive) tome. The result is often tedious for students to read, and it can be difficult for students to know which portions of the reading they are responsible for and to what extent; and if students do not read the textbook, it is difficult to devote class time to problem-solving and groupwork. I am writing a free, online textbook which focuses strictly on the theory and equations underlying introductory physics, with a focus on readability. The book is shorter than usual, with each page devoted to a specific topic to allow reading in short blocks, and students have reported preferring it over the standard physics textbook. It will be available for beta testing this fall for those who might be interested in using it for their own classes.

A Streamlined Approach to the Introductory Physics Textbook

Most introductory algebra-based physics courses focus entirely on simple situations for which neat analytical solutions exist: constant acceleration, freefall, simple harmonic motion. One of the main reasons for this is that most of our students lack the mathematical tools to investigate these complicated situations which more closely match those they would find in the real world. However, the use of spreadsheets and coding languages enables a different but powerful approach to situations whose analytical solutions are too difficult for algebra-based students to deal with. When using differential models, students can observe complex behavior emerge from simple, easily-understood rules. Here we demonstrate a number of situations from mechanics and circuits which highlight the advantage of differential models in making complex phenomena accessible to students with little background in math such as motion with non-uniform acceleration, air resistance and terminal velocity, simple and damped harmonic motion, non-Ohmic resistance, and RC circuits.

Utility of Differential Models in Algebra-Based Physics

Complex multiple-choice questions are commonly used to test for physics knowledge, appearing on course exams, concept inventories, and the physics GRE. These questions are assumed to measure more complex thinking than standard multiple choice questions do because students must determine which set of statements is true (e.g., A only, A and C, etc.). Our previous work found students in STEM courses answer these questions incorrectly more often than standard multiple-choice questions. Here, we examine whether there are disparities in who answers these questions correctly in introductory physics compared to other introductory STEM courses. Our data comes from an online, “points-free” test bank where students practice for their upcoming exams using actual questions from previous exams. As expected, results showed significant variation between students in who answers complex multiple-choice questions correctly, which can inform whether using these types of questions might be introducing unintended systematic grade penalties in course exams.

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Smart Physics: Bouncing from the Board to the Screen

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