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In this talk, I address the question whether it is possible to convey the basic concepts of quantum mechanics and its amazing applications to someone with only a high school background of physics and mathematics. In the fall of 2018, I offered a course on Quantum Mechanics to incoming freshman students at the Texas A&amp;M University. These students, just out of high school, took this course before they took the usual Mechanics and Electricity/Magnetism courses. I shall present the details of this course which covered, on one hand, the foundations of quantum mechanics including wave-particle duality, complementarity, aspects of Einstein Bohr debate, and Bell theorem, but also some mind boggling applications, such as in quantum communication and quantum computing. In 2020 I published a book (Quantum Mechanics for Beginners – with applications to Quantum Communications and Quantum Computing, Oxford University Press 2020) based on my lecture notes for this course.

AAPT SM 21

Teaching quantum mechanics and quantum information to high school students

quantum communication

quantum computing

quantum mechanics

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

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Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

PERC SM 20

In this talk, I address the question whether it is possible to convey the basic concepts of quantum mechanics and its amazing applications to someone with only a high school background of physics and mathematics. In the fall of 2018, I offered a course on Quantum Mechanics to incoming freshman students at the Texas A&M University. These students, just out of high school, took this course before they took the usual Mechanics and Electricity/Magnetism courses. I shall present the details of this course which covered, on one hand, the foundations of quantum mechanics including wave-particle duality, complementarity, aspects of Einstein Bohr debate, and Bell theorem, but also some mind boggling applications, such as in quantum communication and quantum computing. In 2020 I published a book (Quantum Mechanics for Beginners – with applications to Quantum Communications and Quantum Computing, Oxford University Press 2020) based on my lecture notes for this course.

technical paper

NASA’s Artemis program represents a bold vision that will lead humanity forward to the Moon and prepare us for the next giant leap: human exploration of Mars. Through Artemis, with help from commercial and international partners, NASA will develop core capabilities at the Moon, incrementally working toward a sustained lunar presence and validating capabilities for human missions to Mars. Artemis will leverage Commercial Lunar Payload Services to deliver assets to the Moon, Space Launch System and Orion to launch crews to the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), Human Landing System to transfer the crew between NRHO and the lunar surface, and Gateway to enable sustainable operations. After establishing these capabilities, NASA will continue working with commercial and international partners to establish the Artemis Base Camp near the lunar South Pole. With operational confidence gained from long-term lunar surface missions, humanity will be ready to send humans to the Red Planet.

NASA's Artemis Program

The Artemis missions to the Moon are setting the technical and operational stage for the first human missions to Mars as early as the 2030s. These future missions will require the successful transportation of crew, life support systems, and hardware across millions of miles of planetary distance. Furthermore, the propellant mass that is required to deploy hardware and infrastructure from Earth in support of crewed Mars missions is sensitive to the relative planetary alignments between the two planets. The favorable planetary alignment between Earth and Mars (known as opposition) occurs every 26 months, and the most favorable opposition opportunity occurs every 15 years (known as a synodic period). This presentation will discuss how the orbital mechanics between Earth and Mars strongly influence the many aspects of planning human missions to Mars, including transportation of crew, hardware and surface infrastructure, as well communication between Earth and Mars.

Physical and Technical Challenges for Human Missions to Mars

The NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract is continuation of the agency's strategy to rely on commercial companies to enable space exploration. Following the path already started with Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew services for the International Space Station, CLPS is working with both small and large American companies to deliver NASA payloads to the surface of the Moon. Since no commercial company has landed on the Moon yet, this approach entails interesting approaches towards contracting for services and managing risk. To date, NASA has tasked 4 companies with delivering 6 sets of NASA payloads to the Moon with the first deliveries scheduled for late 2021.

Using Commercial services to get to the Moon

Stop Saying “Zero Gravity”?

The term “zero gravity” first appeared in NASA’s technical bulletins in 1968. Since then “zero g” has become extremely common in popular usage. We also often hear talk of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) being weightless or experiencing zero gravity. I present here preliminary results of a survey conducted on social media of college students in the U.S who have taken a physics course in high school or college. Participants were asked about their familiarity with “zero g” or “zero gravity” and also if they thought that astronauts float because of zero gravity. The results show that a very high percentage of students surveyed are aware of the term. Significant numbers among them think that astronauts float due to the absence of gravity, a belief that does not appear to be based on a conceptual understanding of free fall/circular motion and scientific reasoning.


Stop Saying “Zero Gravity”?

Decision based learning (DBL) is a heavily scaffolded constructionist methodology. It guides students through complex cognitive tasks using a decision tree developed from expert approaches to problem solving. DBL was used to teach conceptional Newtonian mechanics in an online, on-demand, general education science course. This talk will introduce the methodology, explain why it was chosen to provide instructional framework for conceptional Newtonian mechanics, and provide results on the effectiveness of a pilot trial of the technique.

Decision Based Learning in Conceptual Newtonian Mechanics

Inquiry-based physics labs often include a focus on collecting and analyzing scientific data. During the process of making sense of the data, students often engage in data cleaning, even if not explicitly instructed to. Data cleaning is the process of identifying and mitigating instances in the data that are misaligned with expectations or hypotheses of the experiment, often due to equipment or software bugs. Our research analyzes think-aloud interviews from thirteen students and observational data in a first-semester, undergraduate IPLS lab. Qualitative coding focused on students’ decision-making processes while engaging in data cleaning in a think-aloud interview setting and in observation data of students working in lab. Results show that students typically follow a process of noticing an anomaly, reasoning about its cause, and then either keeping or discarding the anomaly. However, nuances in this pattern differed in the lab environment as teaching and learning assistants had a significant impact on students’ methods of data cleaning. Although determining the source of outliers in data is complicated, unpacking students’ decision-making process is important for lab instructors to better support students in learning how to work with and interpret data.

Investigating Student Decision-Making when Engaging in Data Cleaning

We present the improvements made to the teaching methodology for a required advanced electronics lab course for physics and astronomy majors at UNC-CH. The course had the reputation of being most challenging for our majors, leading to depleted student morale, and even losing physics majors. The primary concern was that students were focusing too much time and attention on the equipment and mechanics of the labs at the cost of understanding the underlying electronics principles. Our course changes include (1) updating the traditional lab format to worksheets to be completed in small groups, (2) including more circuit simulations and coding to foster conceptual understanding, and (3) dedicating time in each lab for mini-lectures to reinforce or introduce ideas that were missed in the lecture portion of the course. We present results from these changes to teaching practices and the benefits that we have achieved.

Improving Teaching Methodology for an Electronics Lab Course

Scientific reasoning has been emphasized as a core ability of 21st century education. For decades the only assessment instrument available for large-scale application was Lawson’s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning, but the instrument has demonstrated validity weaknesses and ceiling limitations. As a result, there is urgent need for the development of a valid and updated scientific reasoning assessment instrument that is based on a coherent model and targets the wide-ranging skills required for 21st century learners. This talk reports on the development of a comprehensive modeling framework for scientific reasoning along with a new assessment instrument. The validity and reliability of the instrument, which have been established based on large-scale assessment outcomes, will also be discussed.

Development of a Modeling Framework for Assessment of Scientific Reasoning

Modern physicists and modern choreographers each investigated Energy, Space and Time throughout the 20th century. While modern physics considered length contraction, time dilation, and ideas like the Higgs boson, modern dance artists experimented with spatial organization, duration in performance, and the relationship between the performer and the audience. We, a particle physicist and a dancer/choreographer, have developed a curriculum (included in our 2019 book published by Yale University Press, "Physics and Dance") that uses these advances in each discipline to illuminate the other. We present several case studies from our curriculum and show how learning the similarities and contrasts between developments in modern physics and those in modern dance help students wrestle more deeply with the ideas in each discipline.

Relativity to Muons with Physics and Dance

Holographic duality represents a revolutionary new way to tackle strongly coupled systems like QCD at low energies, where quarks and gluons clump into “hadrons”, like protons and neutrons. The duality posits that low-energy QCD is equivalent to a weakly coupled system in a curved high-dimensional spacetime, where we can use standard perturbative techniques to make predictions for quantities like meson masses and couplings. While the original formulation of the duality relies on string theory, many techniques derived from it can be boiled down into problems readily accessible to undergraduates. In this talk, we show that finding the hadron spectrum using holographic duality amounts to solving a one-dimensional Schroedinger equation, where the structure of the 5D curved space is encoded in the Schroedinger potential.

Teaching quantum mechanics and quantum information to high school students

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NASA's Artemis Program

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