Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session L13: Physics Education: From Particle Physics to Autonomous Driving to ContactEducation Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FEd Chair: Laurie McNeil, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Room: Sheraton Plaza Court 2 |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 3:30PM - 3:42PM |
L13.00001: The AP Physics exams: content, depth, and sample test items. Angela S Jensvold, Beth Lindsey, La Tanya Sharpe, Suzanne Brahmia Teams of experts drawn from physics education research, college faculty, and master high school faculty spent many hundreds of person-hours developing curriculum frameworks with learning objectives for AP Physics 1 and 2, and crafting aligned AP exams. In this talk, exam development and construction will be described with an emphasis on the differences between AP Physics 1, 2, C – Mechanics, and C- Electricity & Magnetism. Participants will be provided with examples of AP exam questions to review. Differences in question type and style will be examined. Results of student performance on some of the novel free response questions on the AP Physics 1 and 2 exams (laboratory design, qualitative/quantitative translation and paragraph-length response) will be shared and discussed. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 3:42PM - 3:54PM |
L13.00002: A primer to numerical simulations: The perihelion motion of Mercury Christopher Koerber, Inka Hammer, Jan-Lukas Wynen, Joseline Heuer, Christian Müller, Christoph Hanhart Numerical simulations play an increasingly important role in modern science. In this work, we suggest using a numerical study of the famous perihelion motion of the planet Mercury (one of the prime observables supporting Einsteins General Relativity) as a test case to teach numerical simulations to high school students. The project was presented as a one day course at a student summer school. This work includes details about the development of the code (Python) for which no prior programming experience is needed, a discussion of the visualization as well as the course teaching experience. This course encourages students to develop an intuition for numerical simulations, motivates students to explore problems themselves and to critically analyze results. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 3:54PM - 4:06PM |
L13.00003: International Masterclasses: Particle Physics for High School Students and Teachers Kenneth Cecire Each year, over 10,000 students participate in International Masterclasses. Masterclasses are day-long events held at universities and laboratories worldwide. The students are "particle physicists for a day", learning about the Standard Model, touring laboratory facilities, and analyzing authentic data from experiments in the Large Hadron Collider and in the neutrino beamline at Fermilab. Students perform visual analysis of event displays and pool results to build statistics with guidance from physicists. In many masterclasses, particularly in the United States, teachers work with the physicists to assist students. Teachers who do this become adept at understanding the data and grow professionally. At the end of each masterclass day, groups who have made the same measurement meet online in videoconferences moderated by scientists at CERN or Fermilab. International Masterclasses are an effective way to excite interest in physics among young people and to promote physics in high schools. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 4:06PM - 4:18PM |
L13.00004: The LEGO CMS Particle Flow Tutorial Andrew W Askew The CMS Experiment has implemented the particle flow algorithm as part of its Global Event Reconstruction. This was a substantial increase in algorithmic complexity in exchange for improved performance. In order to attempt to counter some of this complexity, and potentially train some new young experts, a tutorial exercise was created using a single simulated event, realized in physical form in blocks representing calorimetry elements, mounted on a cylinder, within which labeled tracks were strung. At the Large Hadron Collider Physics Center (LPC) at Fermilab, students applied the reconstruction techniques by hand over the course of two days and successfully interpreted the nature of the event. I will attempt to describe the exercise, and outlook for future such projects. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 4:18PM - 4:30PM |
L13.00005: Modernizing the Physics Undergraduate Curriculum Rudi Michalak Times are changing fast in science, yet at many institutions the undergraduate physics degree is still taught the way it was done when I was an undergraduate student in 1988, with the teaching methods that were used then. While teaching methods have seen some development, but often less rigorous application, the curriculum itself remains often written in stone. A typical curriculum may, for example, never make it to the Standard Model of Physics, may never introduce theory much beyond beginner Quantum Mechanics, leaving the student knowledge somewhere in the 1930s, and will often fall short of introducing students to Methods in Physics and other applied skills, which a changing world demands of graduates. The situation is often exacerbated by the increasing knowledge gap between high school and college and a consequent slowing down of teaching to make up the indispensable facts and mathematical methods. Further complication can sometimes result from well meant modern teaching, which leads to a deeper understanding, but whose teaching usually takes up more time and thus contributes to further delaying or cutting the curriculum content. I present a local approach to square all these epistemological circles from the perspective of a practitioner of physics and of college teaching. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 4:30PM - 4:42PM |
L13.00006: Autonomous Driving in Physics Curriculum Cahit Erkal, Travis Jenkins, Jason Alexander Robotics and autonomous driving provide new opportunities for updating the physics curriculum to include modern technologies in teaching. Robotics can be used to teach new skills and to illustrate how the basic principles of physics come together in building a bot that requires both hardware and software. The project I will describe draws students from Engineering, Computer Science, and Physics. We use a power-wheel as the model vehicle. We implement motion sensors, compass, gyroscope, GPS, and a LIDAR controlled by a microcontroller to drive the vehicle on campus grounds. At this point, the vehicle drives itself around aimlessly by avoiding obstacles. The algorithm loops through specific instructions using the feedback from the motion sensors. The vehicle can also follow a given compass direction to maintain a specific course. At the next level, we would like to implement a GPS, which then coupled with a compass would be able to move the vehicle from a starting point to a destination. Also, this project can be a resource for designing new general physics lab experiments and for offering interdisciplinary, experiential learning for students using microcontrollers and sensors. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 4:42PM - 4:54PM |
L13.00007: Agile Project Management in Scalable Team-Based Senior Capstone Design Experiences Wouter Deconinck Increasing enrollments in physics majors with required senior research projects often places unsustainable demands on a constant number of research faculty. At William & Mary we piloted several formats of scalable team-based senior design experiences for our new Engineering Physics and Applied Design track. We developed these scalable approaches to enable 3- to 5-person teams to work on physics design experiences outside the areas of research expertise of one faculty supervisor, with clear users outside the department, and with a management structure to allow individual assessment. Agile project management, an iterative and incremental approach to development, has turned out to be particularly effective. We work with month-long sprints. At the start the team plans the tasks to be completed on a tracking board. During the sprints the team meets for frequent 10-minute stand-up meetings. At the end the team demonstrates the incremental progress and sets the goals for the next sprint. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 4:54PM - 5:06PM |
L13.00008: Neutrino Oscillations in Magnetized Matter: A scaffolded quantum mechanics project for the thermal physics classroom Todd M. Tinsley A career physicist might look back on the undergraduate physics curriculum and see an introduction to fundamental and complimentary approaches to solving problems in our field. Our students, however, can often experience that curriculum as distinct courses where the content seldom spills beyond the walls of the classroom, much less to any recent research questions. Therefore, textbook authors and classroom instructors work to deepen our students’ appreciation for connections across the curriculum and to problems in our field. One approach is through project-based learning. This talk outlines a project for upper-level thermal physics students to apply their knowledge of statistical mechanics toward a question in particle physics: How does magnetized matter affect the rates of neutrino oscillations from a star? I will provide the learning goals for the project, describe how I scaffolded the learning in a recent iteration of an undergraduate thermal physics course, and present my assessment results along with student feedback. |
Sunday, April 14, 2019 5:06PM - 5:18PM |
L13.00009: Using a novel as the main text to teach physical science Lior M Burko It is often a challenge to create much interest, motivation, and engagement in physical science courses for non-STEM majors. We attempt to address this difficulty, and at the same time strive to achieve high levels of student learning, by choosing a novel as the main text of the course. Such a novel needs to include sufficient science content, correct science content, allow for appropriate lab experiments, allow for a complete coverage of the subject matter as is taught in typical courses, and to revolve about a topic that can generate student interest. We created a course on astrobiology - the science of life in the universe - that uses Carl Sagan’s Contact. We are able to teach the entire subject matter of a conventional course without omitting any topic. A typical class session includes discussion of the science content of one chapter of Contact (total of 24 chapters - appropriate for a full semester), after students are assigned to read it and answer pre-lecture questions. We measure the success of our approach by pre- and post course quizzes that measure student knowledge of the key knowledge areas - as proposed by J.S. Foster and J.C. Drew, Astrobiology 9, 325 (2009). We then calculate the students’ normalized gains and the effect size. |
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