Teaching Fluids to Life Science Students*

There is consensus nationwide that typical current introductory physics course for life science students (IPLS) is not meeting their needs. We have been rethinking the IPLS for several years, and our focus in the past few years has been on developing curricula for static and moving fluids, a challenging yet essential topic for biologist. Our approach has been to couple a molecular point of view with forces perspective to provide students the tools to reason mechanistically about fluids. We will share our curricular materials and our data which give evidence that this approach does improve student understanding.