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Each year, International Masterclasses (IMC) bring authentic particle physics data analysis to high school students and teachers. We had just started for 2020 when the pandemic came. By mid-March all IMC videoconferences were canceled, thus ending masterclasses for thousands worldwide. A group in QuarkNet responded by building and facilitating a masterclass to be done on a large scale with a core analysis that students could perform remotely with coaching by their teachers and online support from staff. We called it the Big Analysis of Muons in CMS (BAMC). Two rounds of BAMC were accomplished: one in April with students of mostly QuarkNet teachers and an international round in May. Between them, an estimated 700 students participated from around the world.

AAPT SM 20

QuarkNet creates a big online physics event (twice)

bamc imc quarknet masterclass online

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AAPT WM 21

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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

QuarkNet is an NSF-funded professional development (PD) program that provides science teachers the means to develop their skills to bring authentic research and data analysis into the classroom. We will discuss some of our challenges and opportunities in leading PD during this time of remote learning, the technologies we are using, and some best practices in leading PD remotely.

Leading Effective Professional Development Using Zoom

Goes like thinking refers to the way that physics experts quickly relate the behavior of one changing quantity to that of another, e.g., "the electric field goes like one over R squared.'" This statement is deeply meaningful and intuitive to experts, who understand why other quantities such as charge are omitted; however, it is not clear that students interpret this phrase the same way. One application of "goes like" reasoning is data linearization---choosing quantities to use for the independent and dependent axes to produce a linear graph whose slope has meaning. Preliminary work suggests that students may not understand the value and meaning of data linearization. We aim to describe our attempts to design and assess online lab curriculum in an introductory physics course addressing data linearization, and discuss some of the ways students make sense of their data analysis using "goes like" reasoning.

Exploring student use of "goes like" thinking when linearizing data

In recognition of the need for additional opportunities for remote learning for teachers and students, QuarkNet established the QuarkNet Wednesday Webinar Series, a set of five talks from physicists and educators offered via Zoom webinar through May and early June. We will discuss our experience coordinating and moderating these sessions and share lessons learned.

QuarkNet Wednesday Webinars

Background: In the present paper, we are reviewing the interest statistics in the field of physics at the undergraduate level. Materials/Methods: We reviewed the data from various credible sources regarding information from the past three decades and analyzed this data. Results/Discussion: We reviewed the independent variables such as the number of students majoring in physics during their junior and senior years in their undergraduate degree. Another independent variable is examining the undergraduate graduation rate with a major in physics. In the present work, we reviewed and reported the data into 3 segments: 1975-90, 1990-2005, and 2005 – 2020. Data was collected from different reporting sources of all Indian and U.S. universities. Statistical analysis was conducted on this data and the results were discussed.

Review of Physics Education in USA Universities

Boys’ and girls’ interest in and conceptual understanding of circuits

As part of our effort to develop a concept inventory for statistical mechanics, we have interviewed a number of students who have taken a thermal physics course, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, about their understanding of the statistical mechanics topics taught in the thermal physics curriculum. The questions asked during the interviews were formulated with input from experts in the field, and will later be fleshed out into multiple-choice questions. Here, we report some of our intermediate findings about the students understanding of some of the topics.

Insights into student understanding of statistical mechanics

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has provoked an abrupt disruption of postsecondary education on an unprecedented scale. The present study reviews the nature of laboratory work and demonstrates how remote labs provide a viable alternative to in-person learning. Nearly every college in the U.S. has transitioned to remote learning in a short time frame. Regardless of when students return to higher education institutions, this disruption will influence the way laboratory-based coursework is conceptualized. With over half a million undergraduate physics students, the advantages of remote learning may expand STEM access to students who may have been traditionally underrepresented. Physics faculty have been generally hesitant to implement online labs for various reasons such as time, inexperience, and questionable rigor. This paper reviews the historical progression of laboratory work in the U.S., with a critique of the evolving nature of its purpose and relationship to students’ performance in physics.

Rethinking the value of remote undergraduate physics laboratory work

In response to the COVID-19 epidemic, Seattle University moved all courses to remote instruction for spring quarter 2020. The Modern Physics Laboratory course PHYS 2060 was adapted by organizing it around the building, programming, and implementation of a home-built Geiger-Müller counter. Students had no prior LabVIEW experience and most had no electronics experience. They were provided with a National Instruments myDAQ board, an electronics breadboard, electronics components, and a schematic diagram [1] and given synchronous instruction via Zoom. They wrote LabVIEW VI's for lab bench tools and automated data acquisition. They designed and executed three nuclear physics experiments using their own software and hardware. Relative to the in-person format of the course, students executed a narrower range of experiments and did not study historic experimental literature, but gained data acquisition and electronics skills, experience in building and troubleshooting apparatus, and the satisfaction and self-confidence of making their projects from scratch.

A Home-Built Geiger-Müller Counter Based Modern Physics Lab

With funding from NSF’s DRK-12 program, the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is researching and developing a next generation browser-based spectra visualization and analysis tool, The Spectrum Laboratory: Investigating the World of Color. Accompanying curriculum investigations enable students to use spectra from publicly available research databases -from atoms and molecules, to plants and pigments, to stars, galaxies and exoplanets - to support a wide range of authentic inquiry projects in the classroom. Spectroscopy is the universal analytical tool of science, yet it is typically touched on only briefly if at all in most people’s pre-college experience. Through this project we are testing the hypothesis that repeated opportunities to generate and analyze graphical spectrum plots and data, in association with real-world data and inquiry-based tasks, can help learners productively reorganize and prioritize existing ideas about light and color phenomena, and support them in productive participation in scientific practices.

The Spectrum Laboratory: an online learning environment for authentic inquiry

My students are used to learning physics through laboratory experiments, demonstrations, and projects. To simulate similar hands-on learning experience in a virtual classroom and make the subject more relevant, the students completed “Physics At Home Project”. They performed two physics experiments or demonstrations at home, took pictures of five things related to physics, explained how the pictures depicted physics concepts and principles, created video and QR code of their work, and presented the project via Teams, an online platform. The outcome were varieties of physics topics including, forces, Newton’s laws, heat transfer, specific heat, energy conservation, impulse-momentum theorem, and collision. During the presentation, the students were able to use physics vocabulary terms to discuss their project. They discovered relevance in some materials learned in physics by observing that everyday things in their environment are related to physics. Also, they learned how to present work in an online platform, and make YouTube video and QR code.

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QuarkNet creates a big online physics event (twice)

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