The use of a biomedically relevant active-learning curriculum for pre-health introductory physics has the potential to increase students’ engagement with the curriculum by relating physics concepts to their future career interests. My focus in this talk will be on the development of learning activities and assessment questions to support active-learning in an NSF grant-funded biomedically relevant physics curriculum, initial implementation of the mechanics curriculum in a studio-style classroom, and the benefit of this work to my pedagogical growth in teaching physics. I will provide insight into the implementation of this curriculum, informal assessment of students’ attitudes toward the curriculum, and how I have adapted it to a hybrid classroom during the pandemic, demonstrating curricular flexibility for student and faculty use both in and out of the classroom. 

This talk will discuss the  first steps of the NSF-funded development of a new type of active-learning introductory physics curriculum – one directed for pre-health students, integrated with multiple, appropriately-placed videos by biomedical professionals and geared toward a study of the relevance of biomedical applications of physics. Curriculum is designed to fill two main needs:  1) provide students with an introductory biomedically related curriculum that stresses the importance of physics as a basic science relevant to medicine, and 2) provide faculty unfamiliar with biomedically related interdisciplinary content with a coherent active-learning physics curriculum that can be implemented in multiple educational environments. To research transferability, implementation is being conducted in introductory physics classrooms at both a small, liberal arts university and a large public university and will be assessed for student content learning and attitudes toward learning physics.  All developed curriculum will be contributed to the Living Physics Portal.

Traditionally the study of energy in the mechanics portion of introductory physics has focused on clean, idealized scenarios where thermal energy plays a negligible role (balls on ramps, pendula, masses on springs, Atwood’s machines, etc…) These scenarios are often far removed from the energy systems which capture student interest in the “real world” or in the life sciences. Once you introduce living beings into the system for energy analysis it is difficult to keep everything idealized and thermal energy becomes an essential player. This presentation will provide audience members with a chance to engage in and discuss an activity which challenges learners to think creatively and rigorously about physiological energy. Students at Seattle Pacific University delve into this challenging activity in the fourth week of introductory physics and tap into a wealth of intuitions and bodily experiences with energy. Supported in part by NSF grants DRL-122273 and DRL-8211.

In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the curricular resource available to instructors teaching Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS) courses. The development of the Living Physics Portal site has helped faculty engaged in curricular redesign of our IPLS courses build a shared sense of community, while also providing excellent curricular materials for modification use and in our courses.

In this talk, I will share my experiences participating in the Living Physics Portal community. Using examples from scaling laws, mechanics and electrostatics, I will describe how curricular materials from the portal have helped student engagement in my IPLS courses. I have also participated in the portal’s “curriculum swap” working groups where faculty from across the U.S. and beyond discussed and shared ideas on course design, pedagogical methods, and instructional challenges in physics courses. This talk will reflect on the opportunities and challenges in these community-building initiatives.