United States

With the transition to remote learning, many lab-based curricula had to be quickly amended. Here, I present a build-it-yourself experiment that can be used by students with a wide range of mathematical backgrounds to explore principles of mechanics and experimental design. This coupled harmonic oscillator experiment, initially developed for a sophomore level waves and optics lab at UT Austin, is built with readily available materials and doesn&#39;t suffer from parametric oscillations: a common difficulty in such experiments. In an introductory physics class, this experiment can be used as a platform to discuss transfer of energy and momentum in a system that challenges students&#39; intuition. Freedom in the setup&#39;s construction leads to student-led investigations of experimental error mitigation. Students familiar with trigonometry can explore the small angle approximation. Finally, students familiar with linear algebra can study decomposition of waves into sinusoidal (eigenfunction) components, and an introduction to Fourier transforms.

AAPT SM 22

Take-home Experiment: Student-led Exploration of Coupled Harmonic Oscillators

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.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


AAPT SM 20

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. 

With the transition to remote learning, many lab-based curricula had to be quickly amended. Here, I present a build-it-yourself experiment that can be used by students with a wide range of mathematical backgrounds to explore principles of mechanics and experimental design. This coupled harmonic oscillator experiment, initially developed for a sophomore level waves and optics lab at UT Austin, is built with readily available materials and doesn't suffer from parametric oscillations: a common difficulty in such experiments. In an introductory physics class, this experiment can be used as a platform to discuss transfer of energy and momentum in a system that challenges students' intuition. Freedom in the setup's construction leads to student-led investigations of experimental error mitigation. Students familiar with trigonometry can explore the small angle approximation. Finally, students familiar with linear algebra can study decomposition of waves into sinusoidal (eigenfunction) components, and an introduction to Fourier transforms.

technical paper

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. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.



For the second year of the pandemic, we developed new labs for our life-science stream intro physics courses. Despite the return to on-campus learning, our students engaged in unscheduled, remote experiments. The goal of our labs was to connect life science topics (fluids, optics, spectroscopy) to an everyday context through hands-on experiments. We created ‘at-home’ lab kits for students, combining common items (rulers, string, battery) reinforced with standardized items for consistency (e.g. known masses) and specialized materials (capillaries, LEDs, diffraction grating). We employed smart phone apps for measurement, embedded Geogebra for data analysis, and complemented activities with the video- and simulation-elements from virtual labs of the previous year. Some of highlights of our experience over the year include: a citizen-science lab, insights into the workflow of students, and their preference regarding ‘scheduled & on-campus’ vs ‘asynchronous & remote’.

Lab Kits for ‘At-Home’ Experiments in Physics for Life Sciences

During the Spring and Summer sessions of 2020 and 2021, our students used the circuit kits we sent them to create light sources for use in the optics portion of the course. Various single-colored LEDs and an RGB LED were used with the Fresnel-lens book mark and diffraction grating slides included in their kit to explore ray optics, image formation, color mixing, and interference effects. Christmas lights, Fresnel book marks, magnifying glasses, and reading glasses were could be used in the explorations by those without access to the kits. The use of multi-colored light sources increased the quality of student discussion of the concepts involved.

Using Circuit Kits and LEDs to Teach Optics at Home

Machine Learning (ML) is becoming ubiquitous in the realms of science, business, law enforcement, and even the arts. I have developed a three-week general education course on machine learning for non-scientists. Each day in the first half of the course, students engage with demonstrations and tutorials. They learn how to implement simple examples of text and image classification as well as generative algorithms and adversarial networks. In the second half of the course, the students carry out a project of their own design. I do not assume students have previous experience with programming, calculus, or ML algorithms. They learn by experimenting with existing code to achieve goals of increasing complexity. I will report on the successes and challenges of this course and share what I have learned about how students can effectively grapple with the opportunities and dangers that ML represents.

Teaching Machine Learning to Non-Scientists

In an earlier study we showed that small amounts of extra credit offered for early progress on online homework assignments can reduce cramming behavior in introductory physics students. This work expands on the prior study by implementing a planning prompt intervention. In the prompt we asked students to what degree they intended to earn extra credit offered for early work on the module sequence, and what their plan was to realize their intentions. The survey was due several days before the first extra credit deadline. We found that students who completed the prompt earned on average 0.6 more extra credit points and completed the modules an average of 1.1 days earlier compared to a previous semester. We detect the impact of the survey by creating a multilinear model based on data from students exposed to the intervention as well as students in a previous semester.

Planning Prompt Surveys to Encourage Early Completion of Homework Assignments

Heileman et al. developed a methodology for quantifying the complexity of program curricula. Using that framework, they showed that Engineering programs that were deemed higher quality had curricula and degree plans that were simpler than engineering programs that were ranked to be lower quality. They also propose that curricula that is simpler is more agreeable to students, claiming that a simpler curriculum would be beneficial to student retention. The purpose of this presentation is to determine whether or not this trend holds for physics programs in the U.S. Physics curricula from different universities were analyzed using the methods developed by Heileman et al. to see if there is a correlation between program complexity and program quality.

Curricular Analytics in Physics

Research-validated clicker questions comprise an easy-to-implement instructional tool that serves to scaffold and formatively assess student learning. We present findings from the implementation, in consecutive years, of a research-validated Clicker Question Sequence (CQS) on student understanding of the uncertainty principle as it applies to two-state quantum systems. This study was conducted in an advanced undergraduate quantum mechanics course, in both the virtual learning environment of 2020 and the in-person classroom setting of 2021. Students were assessed after receiving traditional lecture-based instruction, and their performance was compared with that on a similar assessment given after engaging with the CQS. We examine and remark on the constant and differing trends observed in the two modes of instruction.

Clicker Question Sequence on Uncertainty Principle: Virtual and In-Person Implementation

The field of quantum computing is presently gaining tremendous attention from governments, researchers, engineers, academics and investors. There is an ongoing push for the development of quantum computers, advances in information technology, and the development of a quantum workforce. This needs to be accompanied by the development of quantum computing courses and curricula and the development and adoption of evidence-based materials and pedagogies to support the education of the next generation of quantum information scientists At Texas Tech University (TTU), we have introduced a course in Quantum Computing and have begun to research student understanding of topics in this field. Our goal is to develop evidence-based materials for the course. We did a series of interviews to identify students’ strengths and difficulties in these topics. We report on the results of these interivews and our initial work on the development of supplementary materials for the course.

Investigating Students’ Strengths and Difficulties in Quantum Computing

This talk will focus on ways to assist high school physics teachers in incorporating 21st century physics side by side with classical topics. The talk will compare the QuarkNet approach with the seven characteristics of effective professional development developed by Linda Darling-Hammond et.al.

21st Century Physics Integrated into the High School Physics Curriculum

Models like string theory inspire exciting questions about physics in higher dimensions. Fundamental concepts like energy and momentum generalize to extra dimensions easily, but angular momentum as traditionally taught depends on the cross product: an intrinsically three-dimensional concept. Instead, even introductory rotational physics can be taught just as easily in terms of "bivectors," which can be visualized as "tiles" with area and orientation whose components form an antisymmetric matrix. Bivectors have historically been discussed mostly in specialized contexts like spacetime classification or geometric algebra, but in most ways they are just as easy to understand as vectors, and they generalize naturally to extra dimensions. Imagine never again watching a student struggle to master yet another right hand rule, never again worrying about the subtle trap of a left-handed coordinate system. Teaching rotational physics in this language opens the door to exploration of higher dimensions, and it's more fundamental as well.

Lessons from Extra Dimensions: Rotations Were Bivectors All Along

The von Neumann theory of quantum measurement involves uniquely entangling the eigenstates of a self-adjoint operator with the pointer states of the experimental apparatus. Then, either wavefunction collapse, or decoherence (due to the macroscopic pointer states) fixes the measurement of the apparatus. Unfortunately, most, if not all, quantum experiments don't operate that way. Instead they are counting experiments, where properties are often inferred from the geometrical set-up of the experiment. In this talk, I will focus on how momentum is actually measured, which usually follows a time-of-flight strategy, that infers the momentum by measuring the position. I will provide examples for how this works and explain why we need to teach a proper measurement theory within undergraduate quantum mechanics classes. Only in this fashion, can we properly prepare our students for future careers in the quantum-enabled workforce, particularly in the area of quantum sensing.

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Take-home Experiment: Student-led Exploration of Coupled Harmonic Oscillators

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Lab Kits for ‘At-Home’ Experiments in Physics for Life Sciences

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