Session A1: Invited Presentations Friday NES APS

Teaching AP Physics 1 to the World

Since January, we have been teaching an online course on edX, called Preparing for the AP Physics 1 Exam. As it sounds, the course is designed to prepare high school students for the AP Physics 1 exam in early May. However, covering basic introductory physics, the course has also attracted a wide variety of students from around the world. Topics covered in this talk include statistics regarding student demographics and student involvement as the course has progressed; examples of the online labs we have set up, many based on direct-measurement videos or HTML5 simulations - this is aimed at the requirement that 25\% of the course be lab- based; and a discussion of our experiences teaching an online course. Course development has been supported by Boston University's Digital Learning Initiative, as well as by a grant from edX.   

Evolution of teaching at an undergraduate college

At Bridgewater State University, I have been making significant changes specifically to two courses. I along with another professor have changed our introductory physics course from a standard lecture/lab to a studio-style course using a NSF STEP grant. The Energy and Society course, one of the popular science core requirements, was a face to face course for many years. I moved it to an 80/20 web course, then to 100\% on-line and now I am flying book free 100\% on-line. I will talk about the development of the two courses and along the way intermingle the talk with observations about being a professor at a primarily undergraduate university.   

The future of STEM education: Preparing the next generation of faculty

More than 80\% of future STEM faculty that will teach the next generation in the 4,500+ institutions of higher education in the US receive their PhDs at fewer than 100 institutions. Preparing graduate students and postdocs now to use evidence-based instruction, active-learning, and effective teaching practices can change he future of higher education. We discuss the model of the Center for the Integration of Research Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) Network, a coalition of 22 universities preparing future faculty. To scale and reach the more than 43,000 STEM PhDs that graduate each year and 20,000 that take postdoctoral positions, we created a massive open online course, ``An Introduction to Evidence-based Undergraduate STEM Teaching.'' Remarkably, 50\% of postdocs and nearly 40\% of graduate students who signed up completed the course, demonstrating a significant need and success at serving our target audience.   

Atomic and Molecular Separation through Porous Graphene

Graphene, a single layer of graphite, represents the first two dimensional atomic crystal. It consists of carbon atoms covalently bonded in a hexagonal chicken wire lattice. This unique atomic structure gives it remarkable electrical, mechanical, and thermal properties. However, it is the mechanical properties of this material that fascinate our group the most. It is the thinnest and strongest material in the world as well as being impermeable to all standard gases. This high strength, extreme flexibility, and unprecedented barrier properties make graphene an intriguing material for membrane based filtration. Graphene acts as a barrier for gases and liquids and represent the thinnest membrane possible (one layer of atoms) with the smallest pore sizes attainable (single atomic vacancies), and unprecedented mechanical stability. In this talk, I will review our experimental work on gas and liquid ion transport through angstrom sized pores in suspended porous graphene membranes. These measurements help elucidate the fundamental molecular and ionic transport mechanisms in this unique material.   

System-Level Applications of Two-Dimensional Materials: Challenges and Opportunities

Two-dimensional materials represent the next frontier in advanced materials for electronic applications. Their extreme thinness (3 or less atoms thick) give them great flexibility, optical transparency and an unsurpassed surface-to-volume ratio. At the same time, this family of materials has tremendously diverse and unique properties. For example, graphene is a semimetal with extremely high electron and hole mobilities, hexagonal boron nitride forms an almost ideal insulator, while MoS2 and other dichalcogenides push the limits on large area semiconductors. The growth of these materials over large areas has allows their use in numerous system-level demonstrators. For example, the zero bandgap of graphene and its ambipolar has been used in a wide variety of rf and mixed applications, including frequency multipliers, mixers, oscillators and digital modulators. At the same time, the wide bandgap of MoS2 in combination with advanced fabrication technology has enabled its use in memory cells, analog to digital converters and ring oscillators with orders of magnitude better performance than other materials for large area applications. These and other examples will be discussed to highlight the numerous new opportunities of 2D materials.