Session D1: Physics Education

Southwest Ohio Science Institutes: A Partnership Model for Teachers' Professional Development

I am part of a team of science faculty, education faculty, and public school teachers that runs the Southwest Ohio Science Institutes. These are summer classes in science for teachers in grades 3-6. With the help of sizeable grants from the Ohio Department of Education, we have taught about 400 teachers over the past two summers. I will talk about the process of working in this partnership and present some preliminary data gathered from the participating teachers and their students.   

Residential Solar Power and the Physics Teacher

The roof of my house sports one of the largest residential photovoltaic arrays in Ohio. It produces all of the electricity for my house and family of four. With state and federal incentives, it cost less to install than the price of a new car. It will pay for itself within the warrantee period. A picture of my house with solar panels is the background on my classroom computer. I am the physics teacher at Hayes High School in Delaware, Ohio. I don't need a formal curriculum. Sooner or later my students start asking questions. They even ask the exact same questions that adults do. The inverter for my PV system sends performance data to my computer. I post this on my website, which takes it into my classroom. This sparks conversation on a whole variety of topics, from sun angles to energy, electricity, technology and climate studies.   

Anisotropic capillary wave propagation in a ripple tank

A preliminary study has been undertaken to demonstrate the anisotropic wave propagation of capillary waves in a water ripple tank. We have fabricated, using a computer-controlled milling machine, a contoured surface upon a 12'' square, $\raise.5ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 1$}\kern-.1em/ \kern-.15em\lower.25ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 2$} $'' thick Plexiglas plate with gradually deepened ($\sim $4 mm) angular channels emanating from the center of the plate and spaced every ninety degrees, with an additional cylindrical well in the plate's center, to accept the vibrating ball of the wave generator. The plate is submerged in the ripple tank, with the cylindrical well aligned with the point source (ball), and the water level adjusted such that the minimum and maximum water depths are 2 and 6 mm respectively and resulting wavefronts have been photographed. Provided the difference between the minimum and maximum of the phase velocities ($\sim $17, 23 cm/s) for the corresponding depths (2 and 6 mm) of the capillary waves, can be made appropriately large ($\sim $25{\%}) at a fixed frequency ($\sim $5 Hz), then one would expect to observe interesting folds (`caustics') in the wavefront in the directions of largest phase velocity (along the channels), corresponding to zero-curvature inflection points in the slowness surface. (See J.P. Wolfe ``Phonon Imaging'' (Cambridge University Press, 1998)). We have observed anisotropic wavefronts but as yet, no evidence for the expected folds.   

Teaching Computational Physics to High School Teachers

This talk describes my experience in developing and giving an experimental workshop to expose high school teachers to basic concepts in computer modeling and give them tools to make simple 3D simulations for class demos and student projects. Teachers learned basic techniques of simulating dynamics using high school and introductory college level physics and basic elements of programming. High quality graphics were implemented in an easy to use, open source software package, VPython, currently in use in college introductory courses. Simulations covered areas of everyday physics accessible to computational approaches which would otherwise be hard to treat at introductory level, such as the physics of sports, realistic planetary motion and chaotic motion. The challenges and successes of teaching this subject in an experimental one-week-long workshop format, and to an audience completely new to the subject will be discussed.   

What is most difficult for students in physics by inquiry's electric circuits?

Several techniques were developed to track what sections of physics by inquiry's electric circuits module were most difficult for students in their own view. These techniques and their analysis leads us to see that elements of the course related to voltage are the most difficult.