Social distancing has created significant challenges for teachers offering lab courses and students taking lab courses. This talk will highlight obstacles, attempted solutions, and unforeseen opportunities brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic at Randolph-Macon College.
During the last summer, as it became apparent that DCC would be going virtual for all science classes due to the pandemic, I looked for solutions where students can get some hands-on experience in performing physics lab experiments and data analysis which are meaningful, easy to perform and does not require students to look for many different items. Having attended a talk on iOLab during one...
Have you heard students say they understand the physics concepts, but they cannot do the math? Is the TI-calculator still your sidekick in the classrooms?
Imagine an alternative where students breeze through the math and spend more time focusing on the concepts. With the new generations of learners in mind, Physics.land provides a modern tool to perform physics computations, tailored to...
Quantum mechanics instruction has remained relatively unchanged for at least 75 years, following a coordinate-space-based formalism that requires significant class time for instruction on the mathematical background for the Frobenius method, delta functions, Fourier transforms, and the like. This mathematics instruction greatly limits the amount of physics that can be included. In this talk, I...
In this presentation, I will first give a brief introduction to my research stream which concentrates on particle physics within UMD's First-Year Innovation & Research Experience (FIRE) program. I will, then, highlight two of the collaborative online tools I have used during the pandemic virtual-learning as part of my synchronous meetings. I have used these tools both for community building as...
The Remote Experience for Young Engineers and Scientists [REYES - https://odu.edu/reyes] is a free global program aimed to increase science literacy, inspire and train the next generation of scientists. This inclusive program, which has close to 8 thousand registrants from over 100 countries, is making science accessible to help diversify the future STEM pipeline. In this talk, I will review...
A U-tube or manometer consists of two vertical pipes connected at their bottom ends by another pipe. Fluid (say water) partly fills the manometer, sufficiently below the tops of the pipes that it does not spill out when it is set into oscillations. Assume the flow is laminar; in reality that requires the connection not be a single horizontal pipe because that would generate eddy swirls at the...
Even after the pandemic ends, some of the technology that we have been exploring for remote instruction will also prove useful in the classroom. I am going to highlight the use of Kahoot, which is like an interactive, graded PowerPoint. I’ll go over how and why to use Kahoot, and hopefully include ideas that will also benefit current Kahoot users. In this session, we will use Kahoot to...
There is a large collection of online educational videos for the learners at all levels. The use of online videos for instruction has skyrocketed in the era of COVID-19. While we depend on instructional videos for teaching and learning, there is evidence that students often do not watch them, or consume them passively, limiting the impact of these videos. It may be possible to improve this...
The term “entropy” has created much controversy over the past hundred years on it’s interpretation, or miss-interpretation. In a book by Dr. Ariah Ben-Naim (Hebrew University, entitled "Entropy and the Second Law", the author attempts to explain the meaning of entropy, to guide readers in its understanding, and to show how it relates to Shannon's Measure of Information, of Uncertainty, and to...
We can see how interferometers can be used to see both waves and particle behavior in the same experiment and learn connections to quantum computing.
I will present strategies and tools for implementing two types of observing activities in an introductory level astronomy course that meets during the day:
(1) a structured naked eye sunset and Moon phases observing project
(2) lab activities centered on data collection using remotely accessed telescopes
The activity described in (1) is commonly assigned in introductory astronomy, with...
Many students waste their time and energy searching for solutions to homework problems on the web, or they resort to paying Chegg and other tutoring services to solve the homework problems for them.
How can we prevent this? In this talk, I will discuss the strategies I have been implementing at Virginia Tech.
In late 2019, the Radford University Society of Physics club received a Marsh White Award from the National Society of Physics Students to fund a physics outreach effort for local middle and high schools. While the outreach program was proposed pre-covid to be in person, it was delayed a semester and then shifted towards remote sessions with the club members interacting and guiding...
