Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2018
Volume 63, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 5–9, 2018; Los Angeles, California
Session F02: Public Outreach and Physics History: Exploring physics topics beyond the lab.Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FOEP Chair: Rebecca Thompson, American Physical Society APS Room: LACC 150B |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 11:15AM - 11:27AM |
F02.00001: Presenting the value of your research to the public Shireen Adenwalla, Jocelyn Bosley, Leigh Smith, Paul Sokol FunsizePhysics.com is a new NSF-funded web site which makes it particularly easy to put your work together quickly into a format which is accessible to the public. Do you have a paper coming out you are excited about? Present that excitement to the public on FunsizePhysics.com! We have been particularly bad about connecting with the public to help them understand the value of their tax dollars going to work on basic research. We have to do better, and we have to do a better job of training our graduate and undergraduate students to do this sort of outreach. FunsizePhysics.com now makes it easy to have multiple authors contribute to an public outreach post. While it is certainly not easy to design a good and informative page which gets across the excitement of your research in an accessible way, working within your research group can make this process easier. Have a graduate student draft their work and then have other members critique the good points and the bad points of the web page. Then iterate your efforts with an eye to improve the presentation. In this talk we will provide some simple guidelines and hints which we think can help your outreach efforts. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 11:27AM - 11:39AM |
F02.00002: University of Minnesota Physics Videos Outreach Program E Dahlberg, Production Staff Making physics interesting, fun, and understandable are difficult goals for many physicists. In our view, in part this comes from the use of high level scientific language, the style of verbal descriptions and the length of the “lesson.” Exploring ways to overcome these difficulties we have created several short videos, each explaining a single physical phenomenon using simple language and graphics and a demonstration of the principle. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 11:39AM - 11:51AM |
F02.00003: Physics Wonder Girls Camp Roberto Ramos "Physics Wonder Girls" is a free, summer STEM/Physics Camp for middle school girls and was conceived to help reduce the risk of girls losing interest in STEM during their middle school years. Originally funded out of a physics research grant from the National Science Foundation, the camp started out in Indiana and came to Philadelphia in 2016, on the campus of the University of the Sciences. It is now on its fifth year, and has been featured on Philadelphia's ABC News. I discuss how the camp brings together a select cohort of girls who experience four intense days of project-building of robots and submersibles, hands-on physics demos and experiments, and direct conversations with women scientists from outside the university, particularly female scientists from private industry and the federal government. In 2017, the girls were visited by then newly-crowned Miss USA 2017 Kara McCullough who is a nuclear scientist with the Nuclear Regulatory Commision. Other features of the camp are an introduction to profiles of influential women scientists, involving parents in "homework" and a mostly women crew. We discuss efforts to monitor any long-term effects of the camp on the girls choices of careers. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 11:51AM - 12:03PM |
F02.00004: Using Marie Curie video production to inspire interest in STEM in MRSEC outreach Daniel Steinberg, Christin Monroe, Sara Martinez, Jen Myronuk We will discuss a new outreach initiatives in the NSF funded Princeton Center for Complex Materials (PCCM). In addition to a new series of Mary Shelley Frankenstein STEM outreach events, we will preview “Humanity needs Dreamers: A Visit with Marie Curie”, and have panel discussions with our researchers for multiple audiences. This is a collaborative project between STEM on Stage, who are producing the movie, and PCCM. STEM on Stage has created a movie of a one-woman play, “Manya: Marie Curie Living History” celebrates the life of Marie Curie entitled “Humanity needs Dreamers: A Visit with Marie Curie”. In the video, Marie Curie is portrayed discussing her experience and struggles on the way to becoming one of the greatest scientists the world has ever seen. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 12:03PM - 12:15PM |
F02.00005: Quizics: A Dynamic Technique for Physics Outreach. Francisco Ayala Rodriguez, Rebecca Thompson, James Roche Quizics is a trivia card game that provides a fun learning experience by combining historical and interesting physics facts. Inspired by the increasing culture surrounding both physics and board games, this game reaches out to physics enthusiasts looking for a fun and easy way to learn physics. Quizics appeals to the curiosity of the players with simple game mechanics and interesting content, making it a powerful and portable outreach tool. Alongside the game production process, the overall experience as the APS Public Outreach Intern will be shared to encourage the physics community to develop new innovative outreach methods. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 12:15PM - 12:27PM |
F02.00006: Lakota Cosmology Meets Particle Physics: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration Megan Bowers Avina, Gregory Cajete, Agnes Chavez, Markus Dorninger, Steven Goldfarb, Steven Tamayo, Shane Wood Lakota Cosmology Meets Particle Physics is an interdisciplinary partnership between STEMarts Lab, physicists from the ATLAS Experiment at CERN, QuarkNet, and the Taos Integrated School of the Arts (TISA) in Taos, New Mexico. Lead collaborators include an intriguing mixture of artists, developers, educators, scientists, and specialists in indigenous culture and Native American studies. The team first joined forces in April 2017 at Taos in a three-day workshop targeting 10-12-year-olds from the local area. The goal was to explore native science, western science, and the arts, as parallel ‘ways of knowing’ and understanding our place in the universe. Key elements of the workshop included interactive exchanges on indigenous story-telling and cultural knowledge, western particle physics and cosmology, tipi building, cloud chamber building, and the development of projection art using Tagtool[1] from storylines created by the students. We describe the motivation for this novel partnership, its effectiveness as an educational program, lessons learned, and plans for future activities. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 12:27PM - 12:39PM |
F02.00007: SPS Outreach – Beyond the SOCK Zakary Noel
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Tuesday, March 6, 2018 12:39PM - 12:51PM |
F02.00008: Using Superheroes in a Physics Communication Approach for the General Public Barry Fitzgerald In recent years, there has been an upsurge in the popularity of the superhero genre, motivated in part by the large number of successful superhero films in cinemas. Given the high profile of the superhero genre, it is thus tempting to use superheroes a platform to bridge the gap between academic researchers and the general public. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 12:51PM - 1:03PM |
F02.00009: The Politics of Science Eleanor Hook As an AIP Mather Policy Intern, I spent last summer working with the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology minority staff. This committee has jurisdiction over a variety of federal agencies, including NASA, NIST, NOAA, and NSF, and covers science policy areas ranging from energy regulation to STEM education. Through my work with committee staff, I gained a greater familiarity with and appreciation for the legislative process, particularly the intersection between science and public policy. My work covered a wide range of tasks, including assisting with the preparation of hearing materials and legislation, documenting hearings within and outside of the committee, and performing basic background research on topics related to upcoming hearings. I will present an overview of the committee system in the House of Representatives and some specific issues that were considered by the science committee during my time on Capitol Hill. Finally, I will discuss my observations of the efforts currently being made to bridge the gap between scientists and politicians as well as suggestions for how these can be expanded on. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 1:03PM - 1:15PM |
F02.00010: Qhord: Music, Visualization, and Playing Quantum Mechanics Aaron Grisez, Michael Seaman, Justin Dressel The Qhord Project’s purpose is to promote playful curiosity about science (specifically among non-scientists), to foster science literacy in a wide demographic, and to advocate for the adoption of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) model of education in the American education system and globally. Here, we present our flagship development: a mobile application which lets users interact with an accurate quantum mechanical simulation through a musical interface. We explore the issues surrounding the inaccessibility to quantum physics and offer viable solutions to generate more public interaction with science experts. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 1:15PM - 1:27PM |
F02.00011: Visualizing the Physics of Nanotechnology Using 3D Animations Maxwell Grossnickle, Nathaniel Gabor Your science is cool, but making it seem that way to non-scientists can be daunting. One of the biggest hurdles in gaining the public's interest in physics is overcoming the specialists' means of communication – static diagrams and plots may clearly communicate a physicist's ideas to another physicist, but they aren’t going to grab attention from a wider audience. By looking to how mass media portrays physical phenomena in an abstract way, we can learn how to better reach a larger audience, and explore how to connect to a non-specialist viewer. In this talk, I’ll show that you can use powerful (and free!) 3D modeling software to animate your physics in a way that is stimulating and exciting to the viewer, yet also easy enough to generate by a graduate student in their spare time. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 1:27PM - 1:39PM |
F02.00012: International Young Physicists' Tournament in United States Chrisy Xiyu Du, Andrei Klishin The International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) is an annual team competition for high school students in solving open-ended physics problems. It has been one of the most visible physics education events in the world for more than 30 years with more than 40 countries taking part. The signature format of "physics fights" unites the best elements of exam-based competitions with identical problems for all and oral debates akin to scientific conference presentations. The US participation has restarted in 2015 and now is in its fourth year of existence. In the talk I will go over the main features of IYPT, including portability, achievements of alumni, the structure of US national selection and ways for more schools and states to join the competition. |
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 1:39PM - 1:51PM |
F02.00013: Physics Competition Startups: Lessons from Chile and United States Andrei Klishin, Xiyu Du Offering a new educational opportunity for high school students is a noble idea. While the existing national IYPT organizations across the world prove to be self-sustaining, starting one requires climbing a steep potential barrier. If the stars don't align the right way spontaneously, you can still try to align them by hand. I will share my experiences of starting up local competitions in Chile and United States over the past three years, navigating a labyrinth of institutions, cultural ignorance, confusing social networks, constant funding shortages, and school strikes. In both countries the national tournaments got above the critical mass and came to be self-sustaining. I also want to highlight the crucial support of universities and professional physics societies in creating opportunities for high school students. While the organizational landscape is unique in each case, many of the tricks are transferable to other competitions and other countries. |
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