Bulletin of the American Physical Society
80th Annual Meeting of the APS Southeastern Section
Volume 58, Number 17
Wednesday–Saturday, November 20–23, 2013; Bowling Green, Kentucky
Session FA: Physics Education |
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Chair: Tom Nordlund, University of Alabama at Birmingham Room: 1 |
Friday, November 22, 2013 11:00AM - 11:12AM |
FA.00001: Teaching computational physics with HPC: High performance and high productivity computing Larry Engelhardt At Francis Marion University, we have had a major in ``Computational Physics'' for more than a decade, which supplements the traditional physics curriculum with three additional physics courses that are devoted to computation. In this presentation, we will describe our current model for these courses, as well as pros, cons, and constraints of the various options. At the sophomore level, students learn to analyze data and create simulations with Python, which (thanks to the simplicity of Python) allows for high \emph{productivity} computing in this first course. The students then take Computer Science courses in Fortran and/or C++ before enrolling in upper-level computational physics, which is a two-semester sequence. In these advanced courses, the students learn high \emph{performance} computing. They carry out physics simulations while working in a Linux environment, write parallel programs with MPI, write scripts using both Bash and Python, and submit jobs to a cluster. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 22, 2013 11:12AM - 11:24AM |
FA.00002: International Astronomical Search Collaboration: Online Discovery Program in Astronomy for High School {\&} College Students Patrick Miller The International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC $=$ ``Isaac'') is an online outreach program, in which students make original discoveries of near-Earth objects and Main Belt asteroids. On occasion, students discover comets and trans-Neptunian objects. Each year more than 5000 students participate from 500 schools located in 70 countries. Image sets taken only hours before at professional observatories are provided online to the students. They download these sets and analyze them using the software Astrometrica, preparing a report submitted to the Minor Planet Center (MPC, Harvard). The observatories include the Astronomical Research Institute (Westfield, IL), University of Hawaii (Pan-STARRS), and the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center (University of Arizona). Other professional observatories provide follow-ups of the student discoveries. A follow-up is required by the MPC within 7-10 days of the original discovery. The observatories include Western Kentucky University (Kitt Peak National Observatory), Las Cumbras Observatory (Faulkes Telescope), Tarleton State University, G.V. Schiaparelli Observatory (Northern Italy), and Magdalena Ridge Observatory. To date, students have discovered 850 asteroids, of which 27 are numbered and named by the International Astronomical Union (Paris). [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 22, 2013 11:24AM - 11:36AM |
FA.00003: Inverting physics courses at a research university: lessons and gains Thomas Nordlund Traditional university physics courses consist of live lectures by the professor followed by homework and lab exercises done by the student, sometimes with a recitation or tutorial session run by grad students. In an ``inverted'' or ``flipped'' course structure, lectures by the professor are pre-recorded and posted online; live class time is then used for in-class work, tests, or whatever the professor deems most valuable. Several immediate benefits accrue: students can watch video lectures whenever and as often as they like (pauses for pizza and phone calls allowed), the professor can focus class time on assessing what students can do, remedying misunderstandings, and guiding ``homework''; lectures never fall behind schedule. Students can view the lecture or read the textbook first, whichever suits them best. We are in the middle of inverting a section of PH 202, College Physics (algebra-based), at UAB, a research university. Some lessons learned will be presented: deliberately setting a video-lecture length at 25 minutes---one half of a 50-min period---and confining the lecture to one subtopic, benefits of instructor self-recording, video management, using class time effectively, and time, resource and scheduling issues. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 22, 2013 11:36AM - 11:48AM |
FA.00004: SPAD- The World's Cheapest Single Photon Detector Jonathan Reichert Chances are you already have several of the world's cheapest single photon detectors in your parts junk drawer. For those ``in-the-know,'' these are called Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs), but most of us know them as LEDs. It turns out, if you reverse bias some LEDs with about 25 volts DC, they exhibit avalanche breakdown when a visible photon strikes the sensitive area of the p-n junction. Studying this breakdown phenomenon to confirm that it is a single photon event, and that it obeys the Poissonian statistics for some experimental parameters and not for others, is an important exercise for students. One only needs an LED, an operational amplifier, associated power supplies, oscilloscope, pulse counter, and a computer in order to study these pulses. These may be the world's cheapest single photon detectors, but they are also probably the world's most inefficient! [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 22, 2013 11:48AM - 12:00PM |
FA.00005: Development of a flexible and scalable software tool for use by students in University Physics Laboratories Doug Harper, Scott Bonham We report on a new software tool developed to support a revised curriculum in the WKU University Physics I Laboratory. A set of learning objectives, negotiated by departmental faculty, were used to guide the curriculum revision. Two of these objectives required that students be able to measure physical quantities using sophisticated data acquisition and be able to develop their own experimental procedures. The software, written in LabVIEW, was designed to support these objectives. The new curriculum avoided providing the student with step-by-step recipe for how to carry out the experiment in favor of allowing the student to develop the experimental procedure. The software is flexible enough to be used for any of our experiments and scalable to work with simple to complex experiments. It allows the student to design their experiment by building a series of waveforms (data evenly spaced in time) from sensor measurements and post-acquisition calculations. Students define acquired waveforms that are measured directly from sensors (such as position, force, temperature), derived waveforms that are derived from these by relationships such as derivatives, integrals, or Fourier transforms (such as velocity, acceleration, impulse), and calculated waveforms that are built from any of the previous using simple algebra (such as momentum, kinetic energy, potential energy, total energy). We will show examples of how this software has been used in our laboratory and discuss its effectiveness. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, November 22, 2013 12:00PM - 12:12PM |
FA.00006: A Better Future Through Physics Jennifer Cribbs, Zahra Hazari, Geoff Potvin, Leidy Klotz The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between students' goals to pursue a career as a physicist and their beliefs and actions related to sustainability. In order to test this relationship, data from the Sustainability and Gender in Engineering (SaGE) project surveying college students enrolled in freshman English courses was used. Initial results indicate that students wanting to become physicists have different views about sustainability, such as beliefs about their ability to contribute to a sustainable future, than students pursuing other careers. At a time when sustainability is an increasingly important topic for scientists to consider, this study adds to the discussion within the physics community. [Preview Abstract] |
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