PhysicsQuest is a program that provides educators and students with high quality, hands-on physics experiments and has been at APS since 2003. Many of you may be familiar with the PhysicsQuest Spectra comics, but evaluation reports based on teacher feedback state that although the comics add to the overall experience, few students read them and they had little connection to science content. We want students to be engaged and empowered to feel like scientists over superheros. Therefore the APS PhysicsQuest team has embarked on updating the previous PhysicsQuest activities to be more aligned with NGSS practices, DEI strategies (including the STEP UP Everyday Actions guide), and research - based discussion methods. 

In this talk we will review the process used to update the activities as well as show middle school teachers how to access these free, readily available lab activities for use in their classrooms. If we can help students cultivate a positive experience in middle school, we hope that they will continue to explore the world and feel confident in their ability as current and future scientists.

At the Art of Problem Solving, our mission is to train the great problem solvers of the next generation, and to do this, we've been building our suite of science courses. In this talk, I’ll share our design process for creating these courses and introduce our newest course - an interactive and rigorous summer camp for fifth and sixth grade students. This two week course focuses on mechanical waves with an emphasis on sound waves and includes labs and problems using various musical instruments, sound spectrum, and SONAR. I will share our insights and challenges for writing curricula accessible to younger audiences.

The comic book or graphic novel has been used as an educational tool at many levels, from young readers to business school students. We are creating a series of comic book stories intended to help high school and introductory college students with solving specific types of physics problems that most students find challenging. In this talk we’ll describe how our backgrounds led us to this approach (JMRdeA is a theoretical condensed-matter physicist as well as a professional cartoonist, RAF is a physics textbook author and one of the original group that helped start the San Diego Comic-Con in the 1970s) and recount some of the history of teaching science through comics. We’ll show examples of our work so far (which is available in both English and Spanish) and describe the enthusiastic response we’ve received from high school and college students who’ve used our comics.