Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
Nov 2000
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000phyed..35..374m&link_type=abstract
Physics Education, Volume 35, Issue 6, pp. 374-375 (2000).
Physics
Physics Education
Scientific paper
The 2000 Summer Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) was held from 28~July-2~August at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Despite somewhat rainy weather throughout the week, the annual gathering was an enjoyable one, filled with interesting talks on the state of physics education in North America.
Using a new scheduling format for the summer meeting, all of the paid workshops and tutorials were held on Saturday and Sunday 29-30 July. The invited and contributed papers for the main AAPT meeting were then presented on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. As had been done in 1999 in San Antonio, a two-day tandem meeting dedicated to Physics Education Research (PER) was held on Wednesday and Thursday 2-3 August, immediately after the main AAPT meeting.
Over the three days of the main meeting, 60 sessions were held under the sponsorship of various AAPT committees. These included sessions (numbers in parentheses) organized by the committees on Apparatus (1), Astronomy Education (3), Awards (2), Computers (5), Graduate Education (2), High Schools (1), History and Philosophy (1), Instructional Media (3), International Education (1), Laboratories (2), Pre-High School Education (2), Programs (4), Professional Concerns (6), Research in Physics Education (8), Science Education for the Public (2), Two-Year Colleges (5), Undergraduate Education (7) and Women in Physics (4).
Figure 1. Guelph Church of Our Lady.
The main meeting opened on Sunday evening with an invited lecture by Dr John J Simpson from the host institution, the University of Guelph, describing the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. At the ceremonial session that began the activities on Monday morning, recognition was given to Clifford Swartz for his almost 30 years of service as Editor of the AAPT journal, The Physics Teacher. This was followed by an invited talk by Jim Nelson from Seminole County Public School in Florida, who received the Excellence in Pre-College Teaching Award. The session concluded with the talk by this year's award winner for Excellence in Introductory College teaching, Dr Dwight Neuenschwander from Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma. Dwight's talk, invoking both Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was memorable for clarifying both the connections and the differences between physics and physics teaching.
At a second ceremonial session on Tuesday, Terrence Walker of The Ohio State University gave the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture, entitled The Big Bang: Seeing Back to the Beginning. This was followed by the presentation of the Robert A Millikan Award Lecture - Beauty in Physics and the Arts, by Thomas Rossing of Northern Illinois University. Over the years Tom has made many contributions to the teaching of the physics of sound and music, and his lecture made wonderful connections between physics and the arts.
At the first plenary session on Monday, Dr Elaine Seymour, a sociologist from the University of Colorado, gave a talk entitled: We Know Science Majors Are Lost Because of Poor Teaching, But Why Do They Resist Our Efforts To Improve Their Learning Experience? She described students' responses and resistance to the implementation of active-learning methods. The talk was thought-provoking, particularly when so many other talks at this meeting described new attempts to incorporate such methods in different educational settings. At the second plenary session on Wednesday, Eric Poisson from the University of Guelph gave a very interesting talk about Gravitational Wave Astronomy and the LIGO and VIRGO projects, including their theoretical motivation and expected experimental results.
On Tuesday evening there was a very special show of physics demonstrations by the `Third Eye' group from China. Their presentations embody a very interesting philosophy. Each demonstration is designed to illustrate one or more basic concepts in physics in a way that will be both memorable and thought-provoking. Often these presentations have evolved, and at each stage their goal is to be able to accomplish the same demonstration with ever-simpler equipment. Given that we all live under financial constraints, the `third eye' refers to the ability to look around and find a useful piece of a demonstration apparatus amongst what others might perceive to be junk. All in all, it was a very stimulating and interesting presentation, and one can easily see why this group tours China to the rave reviews of the students there.
As is true every year, the wealth of interesting and valuable work shared in the parallel sessions of contributed papers was astounding. As always, I found myself running from building to building in an attempt to hear as many talks as I could possibly attend. Often a colleague and I would split up to hear different talks, and then share what we'd learned over a meal later in the day. What follows are a few highlights of what we heard and saw in some of those sessions.
As one would expect given the trend of recent years, there were many interesting talks about the incorporation of computers and instructional media in introductory physics teaching. Paris Naik from the University of Illinois presented a paper on their web-based Interactive Examples. These are very well thought-out homework problems that provide interactive help in the spirit of a Socratic dialogue. They can be viewed at webug.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/ie.html.
Mario Belloni and Wolfgang Christian, both from Davidson College, each gave a talk on the use of Physlets, scriptable Java-based interactive physics problems. These can be sampled at webphysics.davidson.edu/physletprob.
Ruth Chabay from Carnegie Mellon University presented the Visual Python real-time, three-dimensional graphics environment in which their first-year students are programming their own visualization of physical phenomena. Its power, ease of use and freeware usage make it a must-see at cil.andrew.cmu.edu/projects/visual.
David Sokoloff (University of Oregon) and Priscilla Laws (Dickinson College) led a discussion session on the Interactive Lecture Demonstrations that they have been developing to promote active learning in the classroom. Loren Winters of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics showed some very fine work done with digital video cameras, both in producing motion videos for frame-by-frame analysis and in producing still images of high-speed phenomena. Finally, Patrick Tam of Humboldt State University in California talked about the Multimedia Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), a project to organize and review the proliferation of internet-based teaching materials that are rapidly becoming available. Their purpose is to make it easier for teachers like us to sift through the plethora of new innovations, to locate those that are potentially useful in our teaching, and finally to implement them effectively. You can check out the project on the web at www.merlot.org.
As is evident from the number of sessions of contributed papers and the tandem conference, the quality and quantity of physics education research into new curricula and teaching methods continue to increase. A number of interesting areas were discussed including interactive lecture techniques, studio-classroom approaches combining lectures and labs, assessment techniques, and identifying and correcting student misconceptions.
In addition to the plenary talks on current research topics in physics mentioned above, there were sessions on Space Physics and Hot Topics in Physics. There were sessions on professional and career concerns including Preparing Future Physics Faculty, New Faculty Experiences and Concerns, Balancing Career and Family, How Physics Topics Support the Job Market and Recruiting and Retaining Women in Physics.
Whether one was a high school teacher or a university professor, this was an enjoyable and educational meeting. We all look forward to the Winter 2001 meeting from 6-11 January in San Diego, and to next summer's meeting from 21-25 July in Rochester, New York.
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