Registration & Refreshments – Lecture Hall building, Central Rotunda; Presentations – Lecture Hall 3
Schedule, Saturday October 9; Pre-register here, registration: $10, $5 students, HS students and SPS members free.
- 7:30 – 8:30 Registration opens, Coffee
- 8:30 – 8:45 Opening & Welcome
- 8:45 – 9:00 Teacher Workshops Report
- 9:00 – 9:20 ‘Massaging’ Data: Form and Interpret a Straight Line. Thomas Haff (Issaquah High School)
- 9:20 – 9:40 Student reasoning about ratios and rates. Briana Ponzer, Andrew Boudreaux (Western Washington University)
- 9:40 – 10:00 University Student and K-12 Teacher Ability to Reason About Volume at the Macroscopic and Microscopic Levels. Amy Robertson, Peter Shaffer (University of Washington)
- 10:00 – 10:20 Break for refreshments
- 10:20 – 10:40 Student Understanding of Electrostatic Ground. Isaac Leinweber, Peter Shaffer (The University of Washington)
- 10:40 – 11:00 Community-Building
- 11:00 – 11:45 (invited) Who Prepares Physics Teachers? Findings and Recommendations of the Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics. Stamatis Vokos (Seattle Pacific University, Chair – National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics)
- 11:45 – 1:00 Break for lunch (on your own, campus dining options open)
- 1:00 – 1:20 Stellar Nucleosynthesis: Elementary. Robert Ruotsalainen (Eastern Washington University)
- 1:20 – 1:35 -Visualizing the Lorentz Transformations: Using Excel to Teach the Relativity of Simultaneity. Michael Threapleton (Centralia College)
- 1:35 – 2:00 Relativistic Kinematics without the Second Postulate. Kira Burt, Achin Sen (Eastern Washington University)
- 2:00 – 2:20 Implementing a low budget SCALE-UP physics class. Bruce Palmquist (Central Washington University)
- 2:20 – 2:40 Developing Open Source online Univ. Physics/Engineering Physics hybrid course for Washington Community Colleges and how does this have anything to do with MIT and the National Digital Science Database? Sara Julin (Whatcom Community College)
- 2:40 – 3:30 Business Meeting
- 3:30 Meeting Adjourns
Descriptions:
Invited: Who Prepares Physics Teachers? Findings and Recommendations of the Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics. Stamatis Vokos (Seattle Pacific University, Chair – National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics). The National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics (T-TEP) concluded its two-year investigation of the professional preparation of teachers of physics in the U.S. T-TEP, formed by APS, AAPT, and AIP, was charged with (a) identifying generalizable, yet flexible, strategies that institutions, and in particular physics departments and schools or colleges of education, can employ to increase the number of qualified physics teachers, (b) identifying effective strategies in recruitment, models of professional preparation, and higher education systems of support during the first three years of teaching, and (c) articulating research, policy, and funding implications. In this talk, the major findings and recommendations of the T-TEP report will be discussed and ways to leverage the report to transform the physics teacher education system will be outlined.
Contributed:
-`Massaging’ Data: Form and Interpret a Straight Line. Thomas Haff (Issaquah High School). Students in high school can graph a straight line, find the intercepts, find the slope etc. but do not have a full understanding or appreciation of the meaning of a staight line: that is there is a constant. That constant can be just the “m” in the well known y = mx + b or it can be related to functions. The talk will give a simple, practical example to show how students massage data of circles and then use the “massaged” circle data to force a straight line, thus discovering the area of a circle formula and pi. The same technique is then be applied to kinematic equations. I use this powerful technique throughout the introductory college-prep physics course to discover by inquiry the useful expressions in physics, from Newton’s Second Law to Snell’s Law.
-Student reasoning about ratios and rates. Briana Ponzer, Andrew Boudreaux (Western Washington University). Reasoning involving ratios, particularly rates, is challenging for students in physics courses of all levels. Traditionally, textbooks focused on algorithms. At WWU, we are investigating students’ ability to demonstrate understanding of the underlying proportional reasoning. Results of written assessments will be presented as evidence of specific types of student thinking and barriers to solving problems correctly.
-University Student and K-12 Teacher Ability to Reason About Volume at the Macroscopic and Microscopic Levels. Amy Robertson, Peter Shaffer (University of Washington). The Physics Education Group at the University of Washington is examining student and teacher understanding of the particle nature of matter. The findings reveal significant difficulties that K-12 teachers and undergraduates in introductory university physics and chemistry courses have in reasoning on the basis of microscopic models and in relating these models to macroscopic behavior. Specific examples will be used to illustrate conceptual difficulties that we have identified in interpreting and applying macroscopic and microscopic models for the volume of an ideal gas.
-Student Understanding of Electrostatic Ground. Isaac Leinweber, Peter Shaffer (The University of Washington). Overview of introductory undergraduate student response patterns to questions related to electrostatic ground and charging by induction.
-Stellar Nucleosynthesis: Elementary. Robert Ruotsalainen (Eastern Washington University). In order to account for relative abundances of elements in the periodic table, one must identify sources for the synthesis of the nuclides and mechanisms for their dispersal back into the interstellar gas. Both of these processes are reviewed briefly.
-Visualizing the Lorentz Transformations: Using Excel to Teach the Relativity of Simultaneity. Michael Threapleton (Centralia College). Introductory special relativity introduces the Lorentz transformation equations—a challenging topic for students due to its abstraction and counterintuitive nature. A graphical device for visualizing the consequences of the Lorentz transformations is the Minkowski spacetime diagram. However, generating the slanted coordinate axes for graphically transforming between different inertial reference frames is somewhat tedious and generally beyond the scope of introductory students. To remedy this situation an Excel worksheet has been developed to automate this process. In guided assignments using the Minkowski “graph paper”, students have greatly increased their understanding of the separation of spacetime events and the concept of simultaneity.
-Relativistic Kinematics without the Second Postulate. Kira Burt, Achin Sen (Eastern Washington University). A single, simplified thought experiment is employed to derive the laws of relativistic kinematics without making use of the second postulate of relativity. The reciprocity principle and the first law of relativity combined are shown to have only two possible logical outcomes: the existence of a universal speed limit for signal transfer, or the invariance of time intervals between inertial frames.
-Implementing a low budget SCALE-UP physics class. Bruce Palmquist (Central Washington University). Many schools are significantly redesigning classrooms to follow the guidelines of SCALE-UP, Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs. CWU can’t afford to do that so the physics department is trying a low budget alternative. Spring 2010, we offered the third quarter of calculus-based physics (E&M) in an integrated lecture/lab format for 65 students. A typical class period included mini-lectures, conceptual worksheets, desktop experiments with simple materials, and online simulations from phet.colorado.edu. In general, students liked the worksheets and the activities. Students wanted more worked out examples and didn’t like the room set-up of class length.
-Developing Open Source online Univ. Physics/Engineering Physics hybrid course for Washington Community Colleges and how does this have anything to do with MIT and the National Digital Science Database? Sara Julin (Whatcom Community College). Report on initial development of Engineering/Calculus Based Intro Mechanics online hybrid course modules for Washington Community Colleges (WAOL), funded by a Bill and Melinda Gates grant. This grant stipulates a course creation that requires a less than $30 committment from students for course materials! A big challenge! My work has led to a collaboration with the RELATE group in the physics dept at MIT. We are currently piloting two sections at WCC and one section at MIT for engineering physics students testing curriculum support, ANDES tutorial physics problems and the LONCAPA course management system and how to get student feedback.