Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2015
Volume 60, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 11–14, 2015; Baltimore, Maryland
Session J6: Research Experiences and Confronting Controversy in Undergraduate Education |
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Sponsoring Units: GPER FEd Chair: Benjamin Dreyfus, University of Maryland Room: Key 2 |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
J6.00001: Prize for a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution Talk: The Rewards of Research at an Undergraduate Institution and Lessons Learned in Building Detector Systems that Work Invited Speaker: Donald Isenhower This talk addresses primary lessons learned during 28 years of work leading to the awarding of this prize for work on designing, building and operating detectors, with most of the work involving over 150 undergraduates during this time period. There are a wide range of skills and knowledge to be learned if a young scientist is interested in following this career route, so the most important subset of these will be described. Part will be how to involve undergraduate students at their fullest potential, and important differences of ACU from many programs, which has led to collaborators to make inquiries as to when will the ``ACU Army'' arrive so that they can time when their detector components will be shipped to the experiments for the testing and setup to be handed over to these students. The size of the detectors constructed have varied from small hodoscopes to the world's largest active cathode strip chambers. The science knowledge needed for detector construction is extremely multidisciplinary, and this must be learned by the professor directing the work as they will not have an engineering or support staff to lean on usually. This will include fields often considered unimportant to physics; however, ignorance of them can lead to failure. Knowing the primary question to ask will show where a significant area of concern will lie in what is being done by a person, group or company on a subsystem for a detector. Textbook descriptions of detectors, electronics, and materials can lead young experimenters astray. It has been learning the correct, fundamental physical processes that determine actual detector performance that has allowed the awardee to make his most important contributions over many years of research. A final lesson to be described will be how to make your undergraduate research program self-sustaining, so that critical knowledge is not lost as students graduate. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 11:21AM - 11:33AM |
J6.00002: Access to undergraduate research opportunities at a large research university Heather Lewandowski The American Physical Society has recently endorsed a statement that ``calls upon the nation's four-year colleges and universities and their physics and astronomy departments to provide or facilitate access to research experiences for all undergraduate physics and astronomy majors.'' The first step in reaching this goal is to understand, from the student and faculty member perspective, the awareness of research opportunities and the available access to significant research experiences. We present a study of these issues at a large research university where there are over 500 undergraduate physics majors. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 11:33AM - 11:45AM |
J6.00003: GRAD-MAP: The First Year and Beyond Ashlee Wilkins, Katherine Jameson, Sylvia Zhu, Alexander McCormick, David Green, Lora Price, Myra Stone, Paul Syers, Gareth Roberg-Clark, Corbin Taylor, Sonali Shukla, Stuart Vogel, Donna Hammer, Tim Uher Graduate Resources Advancing Diversity with Maryland Astronomy and Physics (GRAD-MAP) strives to build strong ties between the University of Maryland and mid-Atlantic minority-serving institutions (MSIs) through seminars, forums, workshops, science discussions, and research. Our goal is to give underrepresented students the skills and experience to successfully pursue graduate degrees in physics and astronomy. In doing so, we will significantly improve the diversity of Physics and Astronomy graduate students. We will describe our collaboration with the larger National Astronomy Consortium (NAC) and the GRAD-MAP program's three-pronged approach with the Fall Collaborative Seminar Series, Winter Workshop for undergraduates, and Spring Symposium. We will also discuss the methods employed in and lessons learned from our presentations on graduate school in the Collaborative Seminar Series and the concentrated efforts of the Winter Workshop to best prepare the most promising students to be competitive in the internship, and later graduate school, application pool. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 11:45AM - 11:57AM |
J6.00004: Why I think Computational Physics has been the most valuable part of my undergraduate physics education Matthew Parsons Computational physics is a rich and vibrant field in its own right, but often not given the attention that it should receive in the typical undergraduate physics curriculum. It appears that the partisan theorist vs. experimentalist view is still pervasive in academia, or at least still portrayed to students, while in fact there is a continuous spectrum of opportunities in between these two extremes. As a case study, I'll give my perspective as a graduating physics student with examples of computational coursework at Drexel University and research opportunities that this experience has led to. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 11:57AM - 12:09PM |
J6.00005: Debates of science vs. religion in undergraduate general education cosmology courses Ramon Lopez-Aleman Recent advances in theoretical physics such as the discovery of the Higgs boson or the BICEP2 data supporting inflation can be part of the general science curriculum of non-science majors in a cosmology course designed as part of the General Education component. Yet to be a truly interdisciplinary experience one must deal with the religious background and faith of most of our students. Religious faith seems to be important in their lives, but the philosophical outlook of sciences like cosmology or evolutionary biology is one in which God is an unnecessary component in explaining the nature and origin of the universe. We will review recent advances in cosmology and suggestions on how to establish a respectful and intelligent science vs. religion debate in a transdisciplinary general education setting. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 12:09PM - 12:21PM |
J6.00006: Methods of teaching the physics of climate change in undergraduate physics courses Michael Sadler Although anthropogenic climate change is generally accepted in the scientific community, there is considerable skepticism among the general population and, therefore, in undergraduate students of all majors. Students are often asked by their peers, family members, and others, whether they ``believe'' climate change is occurring and what should be done about it (if anything). I will present my experiences and recommendations for teaching the physics of climate change to both physics and non-science majors. For non-science majors, the basic approach is to try to develop an appreciation for the scientific method (particularly peer-reviewed research) in a course on energy and the environment. For physics majors, the pertinent material is normally covered in their undergraduate courses in modern physics and thermodynamics. Nevertheless, it helps to review the basics, e.g. introductory quantum mechanics (discrete energy levels of atomic systems), molecular spectroscopy, and blackbody radiation. I have done this in a separate elective topics course, titled ``Physics of Climate Change,'' to help the students see how their knowledge gives them insight into a topic that is very volatile (socially and politically). [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 12:21PM - 12:33PM |
J6.00007: Where do Students Go Wrong in Applying the Scientific Method? Louis Rubbo, Christopher Moore Non-science majors completing a liberal arts degree are frequently required to take a science course. Ideally with the completion of a required science course, liberal arts students should demonstrate an improved capability in the application of the scientific method. In previous work we have demonstrated that this is possible if explicit instruction is spent on the development of scientific reasoning skills. However, even with explicit instruction, students still struggle to apply the scientific process. Counter to our expectations, the difficulty is not isolated to a single issue such as stating a testable hypothesis, designing an experiment, or arriving at a supported conclusion. Instead students appear to struggle with every step in the process. This talk summarizes our work looking at and identifying where students struggle in the application of the scientific method. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 12, 2015 12:33PM - 12:45PM |
J6.00008: Development of a Modern Cosmic Ray Telescope based on Silicon Photomultipliers for use in High Schools Daniel Ruiz Castruita, Rommel Niduaza, Victor Hernandez, Adrian Knox, Daniel Ramos, Sewan Fan, Laura Fatuzzo Lately, a new light sensor technology based on the breakdown phenomenon in the reverse biased silicon diode has found many applications that span from particle physics to medical imaging science. The silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) has several notable advantages compared to conventional photomultiplier tubes which include: lower cost, lower operating voltage and the ability to measure very weak light signals at the single photon level. At this conference meeting, we describe our efforts to implement SiPMs as read out light detectors for plastic scintillators in a cosmic ray telescope for use in high schools. In particular, we describe our work in designing, testing and assembling the cosmic ray telescope. We include a high gain preamplifier, a custom coincidence circuit using fast comparators to discriminate the SiPM signal amplitudes and a monovibrator IC for lengthening the singles and coincidence logic pulses. An Arduino micro-controller and program sketches are used for processing and storing the singles and coincidence counts data. Results from our measurements would be illustrated and presented. [Preview Abstract] |
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