Conveners
Afternoon Session 2A
- Maria Gordon
- Mike Florek (Roanoke County Public Schools)
A recent restructuring of the curriculum at UVa resulted in the creation of a new physics course -- one unlike any previously taught in our department. PHYS 2720: Problem Solving and Special Topics in Classical Physics, currently being taught for the first time, aims to bridge the gap between introductory physics, which students may have taken in a variety of settings, and the core courses of...
Implementing active learning techniques in teaching introductory physics courses creates a positive learning environment and is proving to promote better understanding of the concepts via in-depth discussion among peers with support from the instructor and teaching assistants. This talk focusses on the active learning methods adopted by me in teaching physics for pre-health students at the...
The Parker Sochacki Method (PSM) or Power Series Method of solving systems of differential equations offers a very simple, powerful, general, fast (time proportional to order squared), and effectively symplectic method for solving systems of ordinary differential equations (odes), by treating all functions as Taylor series, and equating coefficients. It comes with a priori absolute error...
This talk will be a brief overview of how we teach physics in the Integrated Science and Technology Program at JMU. We do it by picking and choosing topics that build a broad base of applied physics knowledge on which our students can build higher in the future depending on their need for learning more advanced physics topics after they graduate.
