United States

How does one run a virtual physics camp for middle school girls during the COVID pandemic ? I will present my experience in organizing and executing the Virtual Physics Wonder Girls Summer Camp in 2021. The theme of this year&#39;s free, week-long physics camp revolves around renewable energies and quantum physics. On its ninth year, the camp provides immersion experiences to cohorts of middle school girls selected from a pool of high-performing students in the Philadelphia-New Jersey area. Campers come from diverse communities and are introduced to renewable energy and the basics of solar cells, and experience project-building by building and testing solar cars, and solar boats, and do hands-on optics experiments. Campers received a free kit of materials for projects and experiments. Campers interact with physics majors who serve as crew, women physicists and engineers, experience virtual tours of plants and manufacturing facilities, and give capstone presentations.

AAPT SM 21

A Virtual Physics Camp for Middle School Girls during COVID

solar energy

virtual camp

mentorship

The annual UI conference has grown from a meeting to a community of more than 6,000 researchers, program officers, evaluators, program directors, training faculty, and others within STEM, and now operates with a mission to mutually inform scholarship and practice, develop and enhance the community interested in educational interventions, and provide professional development for all STEM persons. UI held its first Virtual conference in December of 2020 in response to Covid-19 restrictions that forced the cancellation of the original March 2020 in person meeting. Born out of necessity, the virtual conference introduced a format that provided pre conference availability of symposia, Deeper Dives and Poster presentations. The 13th Annual Understanding Interventions Conference will continue with that design and we foresee future conferences adopting aspects of that format in reaching a virtual audience as well as those who attend the conferences in-person.

Attendees will experience plenaries, workshops, symposia, and poster presentations on hypothesis-based research on interventions and initiatives that broaden participation in STEM careers. The conference will continue to facilitate the dialogue among education, behavioral, and social science researchers, evaluators, and faculty in STEM fields who participate in intervention programs. Graduate students in these fields are strongly encouraged to attend. Workshops, sessions, and posters will communicate effective strategies from successful STEM intervention programs, present results from empirical research studies, and synthesize the translation of research findings into practice on STEM learning, undergraduate research, graduate education, and student retention.

The cost to attend the conference is $150. There are special rates for post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, as well as conference grants that can be provided for those with need. Registration for the conference is open, with additional information to come.

13th Conference on Understanding Interventions 2021

The annual UI conference has grown from a meeting to a community of more than 6,000 researchers, program officers, evaluators, program directors, training faculty, and others within STEM, and now operates with a mission to mutually inform scholarship and practice, develop and enhance the community interested in educational interventions, and provide professional development for all STEM persons. 

How does one run a virtual physics camp for middle school girls during the COVID pandemic ? I will present my experience in organizing and executing the Virtual Physics Wonder Girls Summer Camp in 2021. The theme of this year's free, week-long physics camp revolves around renewable energies and quantum physics. On its ninth year, the camp provides immersion experiences to cohorts of middle school girls selected from a pool of high-performing students in the Philadelphia-New Jersey area. Campers come from diverse communities and are introduced to renewable energy and the basics of solar cells, and experience project-building by building and testing solar cars, and solar boats, and do hands-on optics experiments. Campers received a free kit of materials for projects and experiments. Campers interact with physics majors who serve as crew, women physicists and engineers, experience virtual tours of plants and manufacturing facilities, and give capstone presentations.

poster

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.

Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

Please log in with your AAPT account or register for the event if you haven't already.

If you are registered please note that you need to be logged in with your AAPT email / credentials in order to get access.

Research-based tutorials---worksheets that guide students in constructing physics knowledge for themselves---have repeatedly proven to be a highly effective complement to lectures in physics courses. Our collaboration has created a collection of tutorials for middle-division quantum mechanics (QM), which has been successfully adopted by QM instructors nationwide. However, many instructors lack the resources and/or institutional support to run tutorials; it can be difficult to find time, space, and personnel to facilitate these activities. As an alternative, we are developing online versions of our QM tutorials that students can work through without instructor facilitation. We are designing the online tutorials to guide students through the worksheets in ways that encourage sense-making and allow students to progress without revealing the answers. For example, they include adaptive guidance pathways based on students’ responses. Early beta versions are available, for free, at acephysics.net.

Online Tutorials for Middle-Division Quantum with Adaptive Guidance

The Tennessee Technological University - STEM Majors for Rural Teaching (TTU - SMaRT) Noyce program has partnered closely with TTU's Millard Oakley STEM Center. IN this poster we describe how this mututally beneficial partnership has provided a low-stakes environment in which Noyce students gain authentic instrucitonal experiences, exposure to pedagogical innovations, menaingful interaction with practicing teachers, and early integrations with the local STEM teaching community. This partnership has also enabled the STEM Center to offer more outreach opportunities than it otherwise could. Lessons developed by scholars have contributed to a 'library' of standards-based activities that have also broadened the scope of what can be offered.

Affordances of a Noyce Program -STEM Center partnership

Understanding the basic concepts of electricity represents a major challenge to most students in K-12 education. Learners find it particularly difficult to develop a robust understanding of potential and potential difference and often believe that the electric current is “used up” by devices. A promising way of making circuits more accessible to students in introductory electricity lessons is offered by the use of analogies in combination with simulations. We therefore developed a new, analogy-based simulation of simple electric circuits. The simulation is intended for use in combination with the bike chain and the air pressure analogies, the implementation of which has been shown to support students’ development of a conceptual understanding of simple DC circuits. Teachers and students can access the 3D simulation free of charge using a modern browser.

An Analogy-Based 3D-Simulation for Teaching Simple Electric Circuits

This poster will address development and initial implementation of a NSF grant funded biomedically relevant active-learning curriculum in my second semester Physics for the Life Sciences course. This NSF grant funded curriculum provides students with a biomedically relevant curriculum that stresses the importance of physics as a basic science relevant to their future medical/healthcare careers. I will provide insight as to how I contributed in the development process and adapted curricular materials of Rotational Kinematics and Torque in a flipped classroom setting and how this benefited me in my pedagogical growth in teaching physics. Further, pre-post analysis of attitude survey results will be addressed to show the effectiveness of the curriculum. This work is supported by the grants DUE- 1934038 and DUE- 1933984 from the National Science Foundation.

Implementation of a biomedically relevant active-learning Physics curriculum

Our open-source textbook, Exploring Physical Phenomena: What Happens When Light from the Sun Shines on the Earth? is now available at https://open.oregonstate.education/physicsforteachers. Each unit begins by identifying student resources for learning, developing central ideas based on evidence from exploring phenomena with everyday equipment and materials, using central ideas to explain intriguing phenomena, developing mathematical representations of the phenomena, using those representations to predict or estimate a quantity of interest, and making connections to educational policies such as the Next Generation Science Standards. All units include examples of student work by prospective elementary and middle school teachers while exploring light and thermal phenomena, considering the influence of light and thermal phenomena on local weather and global climate change, and exploring astronomical phenomena in the context of the Sun/Earth/Moon system. Supplemental materials include instructor guide for each unit, equipment lists for both on-campus and remote instruction, student handouts, and example homework assignments.

Exploring Physical Phenomena: A Physics Course for Prospective Teachers

Building a positive and inclusive cohort feel among students of physics is challenging when their first postsecondary experience is in large lecture-style courses. To this end, this poster will describe the range of different communication technologies and tools that my Department has used to increase our formal and informal communication with undergraduate students of physics at different stages of their degree programs. Comparisons focus on three aspects: the instructor/administrator’s intended goal for usage, the actual usage patterns by students during (pre-COVID) in-person learning, and the actual usage patterns by students during (COVID-necessitated) remote learning.

Beyond email: effective communication strategies to engage students of physics

We implemented a fully online full year introductory physics sequence for life science and pre-health students at Portland State University during the 2020- 2021 school year. Curricular materials such as videos by experts in the medical field, content, activities, simulations, and assessments around medical examples and applications were developed. These were delivered through an adaptive, personalized, and interactive online platform Cogbooks. We plan to offer this course in-class in the upcoming school year and further study student learning and the impact of the curriculum on student attitudes.

Implementation of a Full Year Introductory Physics Sequence Pre-Health Students

This work is part of a multi-institution collaboration developing a fair, valid, and reliable research-based conceptual fluids assessment, the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will utilize two-tier multiple-choice items covering both fluids statics and fluids dynamics. Rasch analysis will be used to create different equivalent versions of the FCE, allowing instructors to give just the statics questions, just the dynamics questions, or a combination of both. In this poster we will describe the process of how we selected the fluid statics constructs and the process of writing and refining the statics-related questions. Instructors interested in serving as a field test site should contact Project Lead Dawn Meredith.

Development of statics questions for the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE)

This work is part of a multi-institution collaboration developing a fair, valid, and reliable research-based conceptual fluids assessment, the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will utilize two-tier multiple-choice items covering both fluids statics and fluids dynamics. Rasch analysis will be used to create different equivalent versions of the FCE, allowing instructors to give just the statics questions, just the dynamics questions, or a combination of both. In this poster we will describe the process of how we selected the fluid dynamics constructs and the process of writing and refining the dynamics-related questions. Instructors interested in serving as a field test site should contact Project Lead Dawn Meredith.

Development of dynamics questions for the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE)

Digital worksheet questions based on health and life scenarios were developed for students in an introductory physics for life science course, to practice conceptual and algebraic modeling and quantitative analysis. Many of the quantitative values used were students’ own estimations or data or choice of scenario parameters from authentic data tables and graphs provided. Students would get different numerical answers depending on their details of choice, and possibly different evaluations of what their numerical answer inferred about the scenario. These materials were meant to support student transition into exploring the physics mechanisms underlying their own health/life scenarios.

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Online Tutorials for Middle-Division Quantum with Adaptive Guidance

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