Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2017 Annual Fall Meeting of the APS Ohio-Region Section
Volume 62, Number 18
Friday–Saturday, October 13–14, 2017; Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
Session F4: SOS/AAPT/Physics Education |
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Chair: Jennifer Blue, Miami University Room: Kreger Hall 224 |
Saturday, October 14, 2017 8:30AM - 8:45AM |
F4.00001: Replicating Ohio's Earthquakes in Physics Classes Frederick Thomas Ohio's earthquakes may lack the drama of those in California, but the state is within range of the New Madrid hazard zone and Ohio has its own earthquake hazard zones in the west-central and north-eastern regions--each with a history of producing quakes near or above magnitude 5. A quake in 1986 is particularly interesting in that it (a) occurred near the Perry Nuclear Power Plant and produced accelerations which exceeded the plant's design specifications and (b) was likely induced by a nearby waste injection well. Activities will be described to engage students in exploring how scientists and engineers use an online USGS tool to link earthquake hazard to building codes and in exploring why acceleration and possible resonant frequencies are more important design considerations than an earthquake's Richter magnitude. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 14, 2017 8:45AM - 9:00AM |
F4.00002: Treating Interference Effects Coherently Lenore Horner Standard textbook treatments of single and double slit diffraction, spatial interference, and thin films make it easy for students to treat these as isolated, unrelated, inflexible phenomena. In fact, the basic cases taught in first year physics can be easily modified in directions readily accessible to first year students if these phenomena are explicitly treated as particular cases of a broader paradigm. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 14, 2017 9:00AM - 9:15AM |
F4.00003: Testing Drag Models with a Pendulum Oscillator Hunter Daymon, Ernest Behringer We designed and built a simple pendulum to test drag models for two 3D-printed pendulum bobs: a spherical bob, and a cylindrical bob with spherical endcaps. The mass of each bob could be controllably varied. We recorded and analyzed video of the motion of each bob while it oscillated from 30 to 20 degrees relative to the vertical. For each bob, we used two different string lengths, and for each string length, we used at least 13 different masses. We created a Python program that simulates the motion of the spherical pendulum bob and allows for comparisons between theoretical predictions and experimental data. We found the drag to be 1.5 times that for a smooth sphere. We also recorded high-speed Schlieren video to visualize how each of the bobs interacted with the surrounding air and thereby observed the entrainment of the air behind the pendulum bobs. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 14, 2017 9:15AM - 9:30AM |
F4.00004: Audacity for teaching the Physics of Music Herbert Jaeger Many colleges and universities have a course on the physics of music in their curriculum, and almost always such a course is directed at non-physics majors and even non-science majors. This means that course materials must be presented without heavy (or any?) reliance on complex mathematical concepts, and thus a great deal of in-class demonstrations combined with video clips are used instead. The open-source software Audacity is a tool that allows demonstration of a number of concepts that otherwise would only be possible using advanced mathematical concepts, such as autocorrelation, Fourier transform, and complex filters. In this talk we present a number of examples how Audacity is being used in the ``Physics for Music'' course (PHY 131) at Miami University. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 14, 2017 9:30AM - 9:45AM |
F4.00005: GeoGebra: a Tool for Teaching Physics Lenore Horner GeoGebra is a versatile and accessible tool for physics teachers. It facilitates precise figures, makes interactive 3D visualizations and graphs, fits data and does statistical analysis of it, does calculus and vector math, illustrates geometry and more. A range of physics examples will be shown. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 14, 2017 9:45AM - 10:00AM |
F4.00006: Student Strategies for Improving Course Grades: What Do They Do? Jennifer Blue, Brian Kirkmeyer, Amy Summerville We have a multi-year NSF grant to study the behavior and achievement of engineering students in their difficult introductory classes, and to improve behavior and achievement. As part of this work, we surveyed students in our introductory calculus-based physics class for two years, asking them (among other things) whether they had engaged in a series of possibly helpful behaviors, ranging from attending class to doing their homework to attending office hours. In this talk we will present results from these surveys, as well as note how well they are correlated with student grades. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:00AM - 10:15AM |
F4.00007: Teaching with Toys: Why? and How? Beverley Taylor The exploration of common toys produces deep learning by emphasizing concepts and connections before formal definitions and mathematics. It also connects the classroom to the familiar world outside of school and gets students writing and talking about physics ideas. Investigating what toys do and how they do it can be a challenging application of physics from the introductory course up through senior mechanics. Toys provide an ideal system for the kind of open-ended inquiry that introduces students to what scientists really do. They can pose their own questions, explore the behavior of the system sufficiently to create a hypothesis, use their theoretical knowledge to make a simplified model of the system and predict an outcome, design an experiment, discover that the real world is messy, think about what they haven't taken into account with their simple model and try to improve it. I have spent close to 30 years thinking about how to use toys to enhance physics education from 4th grade through college. In the process I have collected hundreds of toys relating to mechanics, sound, light, electricity and magnetism. I will discuss the pedagogical reasons for using toys in physics education and the many different ways to use them from demonstrations to laboratory experiments to discussion starters. I will demonstrate a few of my favorite toys and there will be a variety of toys available for you to take home to use with your own students. [Preview Abstract] |
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