Over the past decade, faculty at the University of Mount Union have developed a modular introductory physics curriculum that applies activity-based pedagogies.  During the weekly laboratory rather than focus on a singular topic, students work on four tasks: a set of concept questions and three different experiments.  This allows for a larger number of topics to be covered while only requiring one setup of a given experiment. The focus and outcomes of each experiment can be varied to tune the student learning experience or the desired learning outcomes.  Post-lab, students complete a short writing assignment answering specific questions related to their experience to put into their own words the concepts, experimental process or extensions to other ideas.  The Force Concept Inventory  and Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment pre- and post-tests are used to measure the success of student learning and to influence the fine tuning of the next experience.

Parallel Pedagogy is a novel introductory physics curriculum developed by Pete Schwartz at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  Students explore the four lenses of mechanics (momentum, energy, dynamics, kinematics) in parallel and learn how to apply them to investigate, explain, and solve problems they’ve never seen before.  Instead of learning concepts in isolation from each other, we introduce all four concepts together in the first unit. Starting out simply with one-dimensional motion, we build in complexity week by week.  A recent article evaluating the effectiveness of the curriculum in improving concept application by students will be reviewed.   In addition, freely available course materials provided through Canvas Commons, including comprehensive video lectures, textbook modules, problem sets, and more will be presented.  Through this talk we hope to build collaboration with others interested in making the leap to Parallel Pedagogy.

The quantum world made its appearance in the 20^th century and led to a standard curriculum of modern physics and quantum mechanics courses in America. The occurrence of a second quantum revolution at the end of the twentieth century and the birth and remarkable growth of quantum information science has opened new ways to teaching quantum science.

For physics faculty, the pedagogical question remains what content and how much physics graduates need to be prepared for the quantum world they will encounter.   

In this presentation, I will review the developments of quantum science and its teaching from 1922 to 2022. I will look at new developments in the teaching of quantum mechanics based on current textbooks and beyond. I will combine curricular data and my own teaching experience to speculate on likely scenarios and on the best course of action for teaching quantum mechanics in the 20^th century. 

Physics classes are becoming more collaborative and group work based. However, students have different conceptions of collaboration which can pose challenges for students groups to engage in productive collaborative work. In this talk, we explore students’ conceptions of collaboration. At Western Washington University and CSU Chico in a studio-based physics class designed for elementary preservice teachers, we interviewed 25 students who we also recorded classroom video while they worked in their groups for several activities. Using a stimulated recall protocol, we used classroom video to initiate discussions about their group dynamics. We analysed their responses using Borge’s socio-metacognitive framework, which describes how students collaborate to negotiate and build knowledge. The talk will present tentative themes from responses to the interview questions that specifically focused on group dynamics. 

I published a book "Physics for Space Travel." Endorsed by NASA legends. Book includes relevant physics, relevant math to plan and fly missions to the moon, ISS and other planets. Book was written to interface with free simulators.

A summary of the book is provided via this youtube video I put together. 

Physics for Space Travel - First Book of its Kind - YouTube 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg0CryhwU_E

I've been teaching this for several years to my students - 11th grade and AP Physics.

We have initiated a pilot program in which a cohort of STEM undergraduate college students from Hamline University are serving as mentors to and providing free tutoring for interested STEM high school students.  The program goal is to catch students before they self-identify as "not a math/science person" and instill some confidence in their ability to succeed in STEM classes and careers.  By building connections with local schools, we can elaborate on the tutoring relationships we build with high school students by doing class visits in students' schools, inviting students for lab-tours at Hamline, and getting students involved in other STEM opportunities that Hamline hosts, such as Hamline's summer physics workshop experiences.  The long-term goal is to develop a virtual tutoring platform that can be extended nationwide should there be need and scalability. Current progress along with opportunities and challenges of this program will be discussed.

Create graphable data from a video in a short time by having each student contribute a small portion of the work. Students get to participate in data generation but contribute only a small portion of the overall data set. All students working together construct a large data set quickly, which they then can graph an analyze, all in one class period.

The lack of Java support in browsers, on mobile devices, and on Chromebooks was a major setback for education because thousands of Java simulations developed and used by teachers are no longer usable. To solve this problem, the Open Source Physics (OSP) team partnered with Bob Hanson’s group at St. Olaf College to convert OSP Java programs to JavaScript using St. Olaf’s SwingJS transpiler. This conversion allows us to republish many legacy apps as platform-independent web pages in the AAPT-ComPADRE OSP collection. This talk describes the conversion process and shows examples of converted favorites.