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Helium-filled High Altitude Balloons (HABs) have been used by St. Catherine University all women’s research team to investigate the near-space environment. Due to low pressure, the balloons expand until they burst at approximately 32 km. Cosmic ray showers colliding with atmospheric particles are significant in the region where these HABs are flown. One of the constituents of the collision process is neutrons. A personal neutron dosimeter (PND) can be used to quantify neutrons through the appearance of bubbles as a result of neutron reactions with a liquid substrate. Over the years, flights have been flown consisting of a PND, heater circuit, Geiger – Mueller tubes, GPS, and a GoPro camera. Data analysis shows a correlation between the altitude of the neutrons in comparison to other shower-generated particles. The particle peak occurs between 15-25 km – correlating to the charged particle maximum known as the Regener-Pfotzer maximum.

AAPT SM 22

Personal Neutron Dosimeter Measuring Cosmic Rays in Stratospheric Ballooning Missions.

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.



poster

With&nbsp;an exploratory study of science education for middle or junior high schools, this paper explains&nbsp;why a physics teacher endeavours to develop an updated and adapted curriculum and pedagogy to support and&nbsp;empower&nbsp;adolescents&nbsp;by initiating their learning in physics and moving on to quantum mechanics&nbsp;at their early ages (Grades 8–9) in a science program during our complex contemporary times. Furthermore, the study&nbsp;discusses&nbsp;how the teacher develops such a curriculum and utilizes technological pedagogical tools to engage and encourage young students, particularly girls, to learn mathematical sciences connected to their everyday lives and lived experiences, not as a school subject but as required scientific knowledge and skills for 21 st -century achievements.&nbsp;Such initiation can create opportunities to learn physics over a longer period of time, broaden girls’ participation, increase their self-confidence, and practise essential STEM skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, innovation, and so forth.

Well Developed Curriculum and Pedagogy of Quantum Mechanics for Adolescents

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that supports instructors in designing inclusive learning environments that anticipate and plan for variations in students’ needs, abilities, and interests. UDL-aligned instructional design may reduce the need for accommodations for some students with disabilities. In this study, we explore postsecondary physics instructors’ approaches to adapting their teaching and learning environment while engaged in a year-long UDL learning community. Revealed causal mapping (RCM) is an analytic technique that uncovers experts’ mental maps about their subject domain. We employ RCM to value instructors’ knowledge and experiences and identify motivations and goals of the learning community members as they select, implement, and reflect on UDL-aligned modifications to their instruction.

Causal mapping analysis of Universal Design for Learning-aligned instructional changes

Project-based learning centers student projects in the curriculum so that students learn the required material to complete the project. This pedagogy benefits students' creativity, yielding a diverse set of projects. It is challenging to grade and provide formative feedback on such projects in large-enrollment courses with over 300 students. Even when students create projects in teams of 5 or 6, we have 50 or more projects. We discuss our use of formative peer feedback for student projects in an introductory undergraduate college-level physics course. In our implementation, rather than students grading each others' final projects, students give feedback on a project draft in an effort to improve the authenticity and usefulness of peer feedback. We discuss our analysis of this formative peer feedback, comparing the difference between experts' and students' peers' feedback. We also discuss the extent to which students find the peer formative feedback process valuable.

Formative peer grading in project-based learning: is it reliable?

Smartphone based labs are a cornerstone of our efforts to reform the introductory labs in both our calculus-based and algebra-based classes. Students use smartphones to collect data in the lab (Bluetooth paired with sensors) and at home (using the native sensors in the phone). In this talk, we will give a brief overview of the project, then emphasize the at-home labs. These labs have allowed us to substantially reduce crowding in the lab, emphasize data analysis, and give students an opportunity to be more exploratory in their approach to lab. We will highlight examples of our at-home labs and discuss lessons learned during the first year of the project.

Smartphones in the introductory mechanics lab

QuarkNet is a project funded by NSF, ATLAS, CMS and Fermilab with additional support from participating universities. My role in the project is to oversee the Data Activities Portfolio (DAP), a compendium of activities to help teachers incorporate 21st Century physics into their curriculum. This talk will explain the DAP structure that follows guidelines for Effective Teacher Professional Development as described by Linda Darling-Hammond, Maria E. Hyler, and Madelyn Gardner, with assistance from Danny Espinoza. We will provide data about the efficacy of our activities in the classroom.

Planning Effective Professional Development

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.

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

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

Our goal is to create a mathematical function to represent what free choice is, using primarily philosophy as well as statistical and quantum mechanics. Other researchers are working on similar projects pertaining to agency and consciousness, of which we have employed ideas from theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (Rovelli 2020) and a group at the Wisconsin Institute (Oizumi et al. 2014). We assume the existence of free will, because regardless of whether or not we have it, we act in accordance with it. A more rigorous de?nition of freedom of choice must be a prerequisite to any deeper understanding of free will. The project is within the scope of theoretical physics, requiring precision about how conscious phenomenon is described within our model. Carlo Rovelli’s Agency in Physics focuses on connecting statistical mechanics with modes of agency (2020), while Ian Durham's model has been creating a function of adaptive free choice (2021).

Defining Adaptive Free Choice in a Conscious System

The topic of my talk will be inclusion. I will define inclusion as one of acceptance. An acceptance of at a minimum, of at least a fair “listening too”. This would mean a listening to not only other ideas, but listening to other people’s point of view on all sorts of things including life. Listening to a different culture than yours. Listening to the community where you teach at. Listening to your students. Finally, listening to your heart and understanding what it is telling you. This concept has been talked about and written about by myself and others to also mean “two eyed seeing” and I have personally added “two ears listening”. Really listening to others is not as easy as it sounds. I will be giving examples of what I mean during this talk. Come and “listen” it will be fun!

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Personal Neutron Dosimeter Measuring Cosmic Rays in Stratospheric Ballooning Missions.

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Well Developed Curriculum and Pedagogy of Quantum Mechanics for Adolescents

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