CSAAPT Spring 2021 Virtual Meeting

Saturday Apr 17, 2021, 8:00 AM → 5:30 PM US/Eastern

Jason Sterlace (James Madison University)

Announcements:

• Zoom link for the Meeting:
  
  https://radford.zoom.us/j/91357015550
  
  Registrants: Check your emails for the passcode.
   

• About your Zoom screen name :
  
  There are over 100 people registered for this meeting, so in order for all of us to be able to tell who's who, we request that you change your Zoom screen name to:
  
  Your Full Name (Your Affiliation)
  
  where by "Affiliation" we mean the school or school district at which you work or study.
  
  This is particularly important if you need a Certificate of Attendance from the CSAAPT so that we can identify you.
  
  To do this, click on Participants which will give you the list of participants with your current screen name at the top.
  
  iOS/Android : Tap on your current screen name, and a Rename button will appear
  
  Windows/macOS : Hover your cursor over your current screen name, click on More, and a Rename button will appear
  
  Tap/Click on Rename and change your screen name.
   

• Kahoot :
  
  The talk by Prof. David Wright, Physics Phun with Kahoot from 11:30AM will be interactive. He will show you how to have “phun” with the free app Kahoot (https://kahoot.com/). Please install the app on your smart phone prior to the Meeting. It is called Kahoot! Play & Create Quizzes in the app store.

  If you do not want to install the app on your smart phone, or if you do not have a smart phone, you can also access the app on your browser at https://kahoot.it/.
   

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The Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers (CSAAPT, covering Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the DC area) will hold its Spring 2021 Meeting virtually via Zoom on Saturday, April 17, 2021.

The Zoom link for the Meeting will be provided on this site. The Zoom link and password will also be emailed to registrants a few days prior, and also on the morning of the Meeting.

You do not have to be an AAPT member to attend. There is no registration fee, and we welcome participation of all physics/science teachers and students in the region as well as anyone interested in physics education, or physics in general.

The semiannual CSAAPT meetings are a great forum to exchange ideas on novel teaching techniques and economical classroom demonstrations, and to meet a fascinating cohort of physics education enthusiasts.

Registration: To register for the Meeting please click on Registration in the menu on the left. The deadline for registration is midnight of Friday, April 16, 2021.

Program: Please click on Timetable in the menu on the left, then Detailed view at the top of the Timetable page.

Highlights of the program include:

Featured Presentations (11:00AM to 12:00 noon)

• Prof. Carl Mungan (U.S. Naval Academy)
  Water Oscillations in a U-Tube
   
• Prof. David Wright (Tidewater Community College)
  Physics Phun with Kahoot​​​​

Group Discussions (3:20PM - 4:30PM)

• Part 1 (3:20PM-4:00PM) Share-a-thon

  We will gather in smaller groups in Zoom breakout rooms to exchange ideas on various topics including: Cool Classroom Demos, Science Fair Projects, Intro Physics Labs, etc.

• Part 2 (4:00PM-4:30PM) "What can the CSAAPT do for you?" Meeting 
  
  Please voice your requests to the CSAAPT.
   

For questions regarding this event, please email Tatsu Takeuchi (takeuchi@vt.edu).

Previous CSAAPT Semiannual Meetings

Business Meeting CSAAPT_Spring2021_Business_Meeting_Agenda.pdf

Flyer

• CSAAPT_Spring2021_Circular1.pdf
• CSAAPT_Spring2021_Circular2.pdf
• CSAAPT_Spring2021_Circular3.pdf

Program CSAAPT_Spring2021_Program_v2.pdf

Welcome

1 Welcome from the CSAAPT President

Speaker: Jason Sterlace (James Madison University)

Presentation Session 1

2 Being an Experimentalist During COVID-19

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.

Speaker: Prof. Deonna Woolard (Randolph-Macon College)

3 Using iOLab for physics lab

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 of the AAPT Summer meetings a few years ago, I ordered the iOLab device during the summer from Macmillan. After playing with it for 2-3 weeks, I felt it could be a good device for students since it can perform a number of experiments in mechanics, electricity and magnetism. I have used the device for both algebra-based and calculus-based physics classes. In this talk I will demonstrate the basic features of iOLab and share student experiences with the device.

Speaker: Prof. Mukesh Chhajer (Danville Community College)

4 Physics.land pedagogy and demo

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 their learning styles. Once students learn how to dissect a problem, they simply pick the associating module(s) in the tool to instantly obtain accurate numerical results. Students will also see detailed steps and explanations; visual representations of the solutions; sig. figs. and unit conversions done automatically. The main concepts and the big pictures are laid bare in front of them.

In this session, the creator of Physics.land will walk you through the tool. You will understand how users contribute to the training of artificial neural networks (ANN) behind-the-scene to ultimately learn to solve physics problems with AI. You will uncover why and how Physics.land might just be the right model for your generations of STEM learners!

Try out: https://physics.land
More info: https://physicsland.github.io/

Speaker: Dr Edwin Lo (Loyola University Maryland)

Physicsland_CSAAPT_202104.pdf

9:40 AM Virtual Coffee Break

Please prepare your own coffee.

Presentation Session 2

5 Bringing the physics back into the junior-senior undergraduate quantum mechanics course

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 will tell you how to reverse this trend. In Fall 2020, I taught a one-semester junior-level quantum mechanics course at Georgetown University that worked within a representation independent formalism (emphasizing operators, not wavefunctions). It is mathematically much simpler and frees up significant time for discussing conceptual ideas and physical ideas. I was able to discuss important experiments in detail such as Stern-Gerlach, delayed choice, EPR, Bell inequality tests, Hong-Ou-Mandel, Pickering-Fowler lines, discovery of deuterium, proton radius, electron momentum spectroscopy, time of flight, hyperfine interactions and radio astronomy, cyclotron resonance and MRI, single-photon detection, homodyne detection, and how squeezing is employed to improve LIGO. Come to the presentation and see how you can adopt such a framework for your class as well.
Funding: National Science Foundation Grant Number PHY-1915130 and McDevitt Bequest at Georgetown

Speaker: Prof. James Freericks (Georgetown University)

Bringing the physics back into the junior-senior quantum mechanics classroom

6 Examples of Collaborative Tools Used During Remote-Learning

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 well as research activites. I will give a couple of examples from Google's Jamboard interactive whiteboard, as well as one example from Mentimeter online collaboration tool, and share my experiences using such tools.

Speaker: Prof. Muge Karagoz (University of Maryland College Park)

CSAAPT-Spring-2021-Karagoz.pdf

7 REYES: making STEM accessible

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 the purpose and structure of REYES and explain how you and your students may be able to participate.

Speaker: Prof. Raul Briceno (Old Dominion University)

CSAAPT_2021.pdf

REYES_2021.pdf

10:50 AM Virtual Coffee Break

Please prepare your own coffee.

Presentation Session 3: Featured Presentations

8 Water Oscillations in a U-Tube

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 corners as the flow suddenly shifts from vertical to horizontal motion. Either one can ignore those swirls (by assuming the flow speed is small enough to minimize turbulence) or, better, one can make the connection via a smoothly varying arc-shaped pipe. Make all the other usual simplifying assumptions that the fluid is incompressible, irrotational, and inviscid. Further neglect air drag, so there is no mechanism to damp the oscillations of the fluid.

To set the fluid into oscillation, one can insert a piston into one vertical pipe, push the water down some distance, and then rapidly yank the piston out of that pipe. The problem is then: Under what circumstances are the fluid oscillations described by simple harmonic motion? For example, must the initial displacement by the piston (which equals the amplitude of the motion) be small? Clearly we need to model the physics to explore that question. What would be the best approach? For example, can one apply the standard Bernoulli equation?

So far you have probably assumed the cross-sectional area of the pipes (both the vertical ones and the one making the bottom connection, be it horizontal or arc-shaped) is constant, since I didn't say anything otherwise. But what happens if that is not the case? For example, the U-tube might be tapered from one top end around to the other top end.

Surprisingly (to me at least) even simple non-uniform cross-sectional variations do not appear to be amenable to analytic solution. I will first discuss the case of constant cross-section, which is analytically soluble; however I will show a serious error in previous treatments of this case in journals such as The Physics Teacher. I will then present an example of numerical calculations using Mathematica for a tapered tube. I will then end by briefly describing some interesting applications of such non-uniform cross-sections.

Speaker: Prof. Carl Mungan (U.S. Naval Academy)

9 Physics Phun with Kahoot

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 explore 3 physics demonstrations, where you will have to predict or explain what is happening. (I’ll also provide information on how to do them yourself later.) This Kahoot will also test your knowledge of practical applications of physics. I encourage you to either download the Kahoot app for your cell phone in advance, or you can take our Kahoot quiz on a different tab on your computer set to “Kahoot.it”. We’ll keep score, but we’ll be using Random names, so you can vote without fear of embarrassment. The 20 question Kahoot quiz will be also available for you to challenge your colleagues or students.

Speaker: Prof. David Wright (Tidewater Community College)

Lunch Break-out Session

10 Lunch Break-out Session

You can step away from Zoom to go have your lunch in the privacy of your own kitchen, or stay online and socialize with your fellow attendees while having your lunch.

We will have five breakout rooms open where you can meet and chat with your peers :

1. for Middle and High School Teachers
2. for Instructors at 2-year colleges
3. for Instructors at 4-year colleges
4. for Undergraduate and Graduate Students
5. Free for all

Presentation Session 4

11 Watching Online Videos Collaboratively

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 situation by encouraging students to watch videos in small groups, and by creating the right collaboration environment.

I have developed an ed-tech tool that allows small groups of students to meet in virtual rooms, where they can watch videos in-sync with shared controls (currently, only from Youtube). The users can also chat via text/video, as well as take notes, all from their web browsers.

While this demo is not specific to physics, the physics instructor community has been a pioneer in education research, and may have valuable feedback for the future development of this tool.

Speaker: Dr Anindya Roy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

12 Entropy - What's in a Meaning

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 the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In this talk I want to share some of the ideas presented in this book in order to remove any speculative interpretations of the term "entropy".

Speaker: Dr John S. Ochab, jr. (Reynolds Community College)

13 Wave-Particle Duality and Interference

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.

Speaker: Ms Maajida Murdock (Morgan State University)

2:00 PM Virtual Coffee Break

Please prepare your own coffee.

Presentation Session 5

14 Sky and Telescope for Introductory Astronomy

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 the goal of students developing an understanding of the connections between motions of celestial objects and patterns observed in the sky from Earth. A critical component of the structure presented here is an associated scoring script. The algorithm uses Sun and Moon position data and Moon phase data downloaded by the user from the United States Naval Observatory to score student input and provide feedback in an efficient manner. This scalable method allows instructors to assign and grade student observations in a large university class. Lab activities described in part (2) make use of the Skynet robotic telescope network, which allows students to obtain and analyze real telescope data to investigate concepts such as Standard Candles, Rotation Curves, and Hubble’s Law.

Speaker: Dr Jennifer Scott (Towson University)

15 How can we prevent students from searching for homework solutions on the web?

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.

Speaker: Prof. Tatsu Takeuchi (Virginia Tech Department of Physics)

20210417-CSAAPT-takeuchi.pdf

16 The Radford University Society of Physics Students (SPS) Physics Outreach Program

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 participants via Zoom. The goal of this outreach is to promote and increase attention towards STEM related fields such as physics. The outreach events revolved around teaching high school students basic circuitry by building a simple unpowered radio. The parts were given to the high schoolers so that they could keep their radios after the events. The SPS hosted two (so far) outreach opportunities with high schools in the area near Radford University. The two outreach events will be discussed, and we will share the lessons learned from these events as our group continues our outreach work.

Speakers: Samuel Williams (Radford University Student), Sami Reitz (Radford University Student), Hunter Brandon (Radford University Student), Megan Brown (Radford University Student), Mckenzie Chatting (Radford University Student), Caitlynn Fischer (Radford University Student), Jonathan Halferty (Radford University Student), Kaleb Martin (Radford University Student), Anith Muthalaly (Radford University Student), Andy Nelson (Radford University Student), Krislyn Sourivong (Radford University Student)

3:10 PM Virtual Coffee Break

Please prepare your own coffee.

Discussion Session

17 Share-a-thon

Please join one of the following Zoom break-out rooms to share your ideas and opinions on the respective topic:

1. Ideas for Cool Classroom Demonstrations
2. Ideas for improving the quality of student research/science fair projects
3. Ideas for improving Introductory Physics Labs
4. Ideas for introducing various "flavors" into the physics curriculum : Computational Physics/Programming in Physics/Engineering Physics, etc.
5. Anything else that you would like to discuss

18 "What can the CSAAPT do for you?" Meeting

Please tell us what the CSAAPT can provide to assist in your teaching, e.g.

1. Talks by Physics Education research experts at the CSAAPT meetings
2. Talks by various experts working on the frontiers of physics and astronomy (e.g. LIGO, space telescope, LHC, etc.)
   with emphasis on how to explain the research to high school students
3. More talks about physics courses/programs that were successful at various institutions
4. Can I get help in meeting the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standard) and other standards?
5. Tutorials/workshops for various software and tools (e.g LaTeX, Overleaf, Mathematica, Glowscript, etc.) that would be useful for teaching
6. Tell me more about the availability of physics outreach programs, astronomical observatories with open houses,
   planetariums, etc. in my area where I can take my students to
7. etc.

Closing Statements

19 Closing statements form the CSAAPT President

Speaker: Jason Sterlace (James Madison University)

Post-Meeting Social & CSAAPT Business Meeting

20 Post-Meeting Social in Zoom Break-out Rooms & CSAAPT Business Meeting

We will have the following Zoom Break-out Rooms where you can socialize with other attendees:

1. for Middle and High School Teachers
2. for Instructors at 2-year colleges
3. for Instructors at 4-year colleges
4. for Undergraduate and Graduate Students
5. Free for all
6. CSAAPT Business Meeting

Room #6 is for the CSAAPT business meeting. CSAAPT members, please gather here.