Workshop Physics: Seeing Physics in Action

Frederick Moore
Associate Professor of Physics
Department of Physics
Whitman College
Walla Walla, Washington
moore@whitman.edu

Why use technology?
Why did I turn to learning technology? Because - flat out - the students were not learning.

Technology is a means to an end. It can be a monetary black hole, but it helps us implement teaching strategies that are substantially different from the traditional methods of teaching introductory physics. When I say traditional strategies, I mean the talking head lecture with a few demonstrations, combined with a confirmation-based laboratory in which students are told to make certain measurements and try to get the right number.

The problem with those strategies is we just don't believe they work. Our students could give answers to problems they'd seen before, but they could not solve new, sometimes even slightly different problems. The only people for whom the old system works beautifully seem to be the very brightest students; the best students will always do well, as well as a large fraction of those who came into the course expecting to pursue a physics or pre-engineering major. Our introductory-level physics course, however, serves everybody who needs introductory physics. Prospective physics majors, premed students, biology students, chemistry majors - we intentionally want a mixed audience, sitting next to each other, talking to each other, and exchanging perspectives on what they're learning.

The strategy
So we adopted a new model - very loosely based on the Workshop Physics model developed at Dickinson College - about a year after I attended one of the Workshop Physics seminars held yearly at Dickinson. Workshop Physics uses activity-based learning, both in the classroom and the laboratory, to teach introductory physics.

Workshop Physics Workshop Physics Computer Software Pasco Scientific Gravitation 5.0 Center for Science and Mathematics Teaching - Tufts University

Students do real physics, taking measurements, making predictions, and evaluating data they've gathered. There are a variety of software packages and tools available to facilitate the laboratory portion of our course. Please visit the Workshop Physics web site.

We've adapted this model somewhat: in addition to the lab component, we also have a classroom component, plus assignments outside of class. Pragmatically, we don't have the staffing or equipment to be completely lab-based. Philosophically, the faculty at Whitman believe there is a place for the classroom in introductory physics. There are still no lectures, but we discuss issues and for at least half the time the students work in small problem-solving groups. We're very big on collaborative learning. The instructor circulates, asking leading questions to guide the groups toward solutions.

The course
The course, General Physics, is a two-semester, calculus-based course serving about 100 students per semester. We cover mechanics in the fall and electricity and magnetism in the spring. We used to have one large lecture section; we now divide the course into five sections in the fall, four in the spring. Once a week, all the sections meet for a "common presentation": for large demonstrations, to hear guest speakers, to view and discuss animations, and to make sure we're all at the same point of the course. The sections, each led by a tenure-track faculty member, meet two more times a week. The laboratory meets for one-and-a-half hours, twice a week, and these meetings are also taught by a full-time faculty member.

The learning technology
Web-based logistical tools: Two of the main things that Internet technology enables are very rapid communication and management of the course logistics. This is essential for recording the students' progress, because the students don't track with just one faculty member through the whole class. For example, a student's laboratory instructor is probably not his or her "classroom" instructor. We wrote a collection of web-based logistical tools that help the faculty assign grades for different components of the students' work. The students have access to their grades the instant we've assigned them, which gives them immediate feedback about how well they've done.

One of the conditions of the grant that funded the project is that we make these Web-based tools available on the Web when we're finished developing them. We'll be happy to share these tools with anyone - just contact us at: physics@whitman.edu. The tools are very straightforward and don't require particularly specialized computer hardware.

Laboratory instrumentation and interfaces: We use a collection of standardized, commercially available sensors, which we just call instrumentation, from Pasco Scientific. The various instruments plug into an interface box, which allows a computer to talk to the instruments. Because this is a measurement-based laboratory, the students use this technology to take lots and lots of measurements - one day they'll make measurements of voltages; the next day, they'll use a different set of instrumentation to measure forces.

The students learn one software interface, essentially a data-taking interface, and then they can take any sort of data they want. They can transfer the data to a spreadsheet like Excel, or a slightly more specialized data analysis software; they use spreadsheets, crunch numbers, plot graphs, look for trends, put on error bars, and make statements about the conclusions the data supports.

We're trying to immerse them in scientific endeavor - they make some measurements to get a feel for what's going on, they make a hypothesis about how physically the system is likely to behave under certain conditions, they make measurements under those conditions, and they match up to see whether the data supports their hypothesis.

An example: In the fall, when we're covering Newton's Laws, forces, friction, and such, we ask the students to design a handicapped-accessible ramp that will not be too slippery for someone walking up it. The students have to figure out by making measurements the coefficient of friction between the person's shoes and the metal of the ramp. They then need to determine how steep the ramp can be before the force of friction is not enough to hold someone on the ramp. They're also asked to write this up as an engineering analysis for a nonscientist, just as they would have to do if they were hired as an engineering consultant to investigate this problem for a manufacturing company.

Simulation tools: We also use simulations of plots and graphs, using programs and macros written in-house that run in Excel. The students use these simulations to investigate the invisible stuff - electric and magnetic fields and electric potentials - during the second semester for the Electricity and Magnetism class. Because these were developed with grant money, we can certainly make these available. We also have a few simulations for both gravitation and electrostatics, written for us by a retired physics faculty member. And there's a very nice simulation tool called Gravitation 5.0, available as Macintosh shareware software on the Internet, that shows students how orbital motion works.

The project support
To fund our project, we applied for and received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to rework our introductory course so that it would be more effective and useful for life science and nonphysics majors. We couldn't have done this without the grant. The funding went for four years; it paid for a faculty member to help us with curricular development and gave us the additional faculty time needed to teach, because it's more faculty intensive. The grant also covered building renovation, equipment purchases, and three years of software developers' time.

The results
How is it working? We've evaluated the project using both a generic survey from the college administration and a questionnaire we wrote ourselves that requires short answers. The student evaluations, after 2 years, are positive. We've also used a standardized testing instrument, developed at the Center for Science and Math Teaching at Tufts University, called the Force and Motion Concept Evaluation (FMCE). We have not undertaken exhaustive comparisons of how our students do compared to students in other reform-minded introductory courses. However, we have some evidence that our students do well compared to students using the standard Workshop Physics curriculum and better than most students in a traditional curriculum, including the one formerly taught at Whitman College. Certainly we don't believe that ours is the one-and-only best way to teach. It does, though, seem to be serving our needs.

Starting anything new is an effort - building a curriculum like the one we've developed takes a lot of patience and a lot of time, and the technology always has bugs associated with it. But we think the students learn. We get very good feedback about the lab component - the students like the lab, they like the instrumentation. They like seeing physics in action.

If you have any questions about our project, you can contact me at:
moore@whitman.edu