American Association of Physics Teachers
Chesapeake Section

Keynote Banquet Speaker Dennis M. Bushnell Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center "Prospective Future (circa 2030) Technological Developments and Societal Implications"

The local contact person for the Fall 1999 Section Meeting at the Randolph-Macon College is:

George F. Spagna, Jr. Dept. of Physics P. O. Box 5005 Randolph-Macon College Ashland, VA 23005-5505

E-mail: gspagna@rmc.edu       Phone: (804) 752-7344       FAX: (804) 752-4724

The current president of the Chesapeake Section is:

Bill Ingham Physics Department, Miller 112 James Madison University Harrisonburg, VA 22807

E-mail: inghamwh@jmu.edu Phone: (540) 568-6676

The banquet will be held on Friday evening, November 5. A reception begins at 6:00pm in the Copley Science Center, Room 206, followed by the banquet at 7:00pm on the second floor of the Estes Dining Hall. The cost will be $15.00 per person.

Reservation requests for the banquet should be sent to George Spagna by Monday, November 1. Please specify if a vegetarian entrée is preferred. Reservations may be sent via surface mail or e-mail. Prepaid reservations should have checks payable to CSAAPT.

Copley 205
Modern University Physics: Exploring Nature Inside Out
Greg Hood, Tidewater Community College, Virginia Beach, tchoodg@tc.cc.va.us or cghood@erols.com

Since the fall of 1998 we have been using Modern University Physics for the first semester of our introductory calculus physics classes. At present I am working on writing material for the second semester. This workshop is for those who are interested in exploring a new approach to intro physics and for those who might be interested in field testing Modern University Physics at some future date. A copy of the twelve chapters currently available will be given to each attendee. Please notify me if you plan to attend, so that I will have enough copies on hand.

This workshop is meant to introduce high-school and undergraduate teachers to a new resource on the world-wide web. "From Stargazers to Starships" is a unique web-based textbook, divided about equally between basic astronomy, Newtonian mechanics and spaceflight, with a fair amount of non-calculus math. Because of the attraction space has on young minds, it uses space flight and exploration to illustrate its subjects. History is the unifying framework and also provides examples of scientific inference, stories of discovery and cross-cultural links. The workshop will lead teachers through a tour of the site--some 60 linked main files, a 12-unit math course, 7 units on the Sun--as well as a guidance unit for teachers, lesson plans, two timelines , Q&A from users, 52 problems, even a Spanish translation, still incomplete. After that, specific subjects will be described in more detail.

Homepage is http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sintro.htm. No CDs are as yet available, but if you bring your laptop with 4 meg free space, you will be able to download all files and images from floppies. For more about "Stargazers," see "Using Space to Teach Physics" February '99, "The Physics Teacher."
    From Stargazers to Starships
    The Exploration of the Earth's Magnetosphere

The Physics Education Research Group at the University of Maryland has been conducting systematic investigations into student understanding of topics in modern physics and elementary quantum mechanics. We use this research as a guide to curriculum development and instruction. Our target audience is primarily sophomore and junior level engineering students at the University of Maryland, but the research results and curriculum are relevant to all classes that cover topics in modern physics or quantum mechanics. In this workshop we will describe the research and work through sample materials.

*sponsored in part by NSF grant DUE9652877 and Department of Education FIPSE grant 116B70186.

Saturday, November 6
starting at 8:30am

All papers will be presented in Copley 101

Participant photos: (photo 1, photo 2, photo 3, photo 4)

The Universe on a Desktop: Observational Astronomy Simulations in the Instructional Laboratory
Dick Cooper, Gettysburg College, jcooper@gettysburg.edu

Though the value of hands-on learning has long been recognized by educators, it is difficult to design laboratories in astronomy classes thata present realistic astrophysical techniques to undergraduate students. Unlike most other sciences, astronomy is largely observational, not experimental, and making useful observations involves expensive equipment over time scales inconvenient for pedagogy. In recent years, however, astronomy has gone almost completely digital, and the advent of large on-line data bases and fast personal computers has made it possible to realistically simulate the experience of research astrophysics in the laboratory.

Since 1992, Project CLEA (Contemporary Laboratory Experiences in Astronomy) has been developing such computer-based exercises aimed primarily at the introductory astronomy laboratory. These exercises simulate impotant techniques of astronomical research using digital data and Windows-based software. Each of the 9 exercises developed to date consists of software, technical guides for teachers, and student manuals for the exercises. CLEA software is used at many institutions in all the United States and over 60 countries world-wide, in a variety of settings from middle school to upperclass astronomy classes.

We will describe and demonstrate some of the CLEA materials and talk about our design philosophy. Plans for future development will be presented.

Project CLEA is supported by grants from Gettysburg College and the National Science Foundation.

Designing and constructing rocket or balloon payloads with electronic instruments can be an exciting special project for a physics class. This paper describes some payload ideas with sources of electronic parts and equipment needed.

Software and hardware that can be used for tracking the progress of balloon and rocket flights as well as real-time transmission of data to the ground will be described. A demonstration of full motion video transmitted from a balloon and rocket payload will be given.     (photo)
    Special Projects In Physics and Engineering Technology Courses Using Rocket and Balloon Payloads

"Two-Year Colleges in the Twenty First Century: Breaking Down Barriers" (TYC21) is an NSF funded project of the AAPT to improve physics education by promoting communication and interaction among two-year college physics faculty. Funding has ended, but activities continue. Accomplishments and prospects will be discussed.     (photo 1, photo 2)

This paper, being prepared for publication in the American Journal of Physics, introduces a new graphical technique for the solution of the Lorentz transform in two (x-t) dimensions. The presentation includes a novel derivation of the Lorentz transform from the invariant space time interval (tau). The graphical solution maintains orthogonality and equal units of measure of time and distance in both reference frames. The graphical solution yields the velocity four-vector explicitly, with direct application to more advanced topics in special relativity involving mass, momentum and energy.     (photo 1, photo 2)
    Word document (0.4Mb), PowerPoint presentation (1.2Mb), PowerPoint handouts (0.8Mb)

In a well-known lecture-demonstration in a general physics course for science and engineering majors, the students observe a thin metal plate swinging into the field os a strong permanent magnet via a pendulum. The magnetic force on the plate, as it both enters and leaves the magnetic field, is such as to oppose its motion. In this paper, a theoretical analysis, employing vector analysis, of the reason for this behavior will be given.     (photo)

Less than one-third of high school physics teachers have an undergraduate degree in physics. In addition to courses in education, their undergraduate training generally includes courses in chemistry, biology, earth science, and mathematics, but very little physics. Over the past several years, funding from SCHEF, NSF, and the Department of Physics have supported several summer high school physics and physical science inservice teacher programs at UVa. After numerous discussions with and observations of teachers, we have concluded that teachers need and desire more physics content, problem solving, hands-on laboratory experiences, and pedagogical methods of teaching physics. The proposed program is mainly for teachers who presently (or desire to) teach physical science or physics in grades 6-12, but do not have an undergraduate degree in physics. We presently have 23 teachers in the program and expect it to expand rapidly. Some courses are taken using distance learning techniques providing a mechanism by which teachers can be earning credit at home and while teaching.     (photo)
    Master of Arts in Physics Education at the University of Virginia

Non-science majors at the Community College need and usually are required to take a year of a lab science course but rarely take a physics course. This can be due to lack of mathematics abilities or just plain fearful of "physics". I have been teaching a semester INTRO ASTRONOMY and INTRO METEOROLGY course for the last two years to mostly non-science majors in what seems to be a growing demand for these courses. These two semesters of popular-topic courses serve as a full year of the lab-science needed and allow me to "slip" in a lot of physics which the students would otherwise not get in their education. By teaching these "physics related" courses, physics faculty can booster up their enrollments and put their courses in great demand.     (photo 1, photo 2)

I have been using using fictitious forces in a conceptual physics class for the last several years. A number of examples and the success and pitfalls of this approach will be discussed. I will also touch on what I perceive to be the perceptual/psychological factors behind the appeal of fictitious forces to the student.     (photo 1, photo 2)

The basic Stamp II microprocessor/microcontroller electronics kit from Parallax, Inc. can be used in student laboratory experiments or for demonstrations of sensor data acquisition and device control. The Stamp integated circuit (IC) executes programs written in a variant of the BASIC programming language when downloaded from a PC via the serial port. A user-written program selects input/output ports on the IC, sets up read/write flow, accepts external sensor input, and drives external devices: RC circuits, LEDs, servomotors, and other ICs. The programmed chip can also upload data to the PC screen. Among the Stamp kit applications are: using a light-sensing element to turn a motor off and on, generating telephone dialing tones, and building an analog-to digital voltage converter.     (photo 1, photo 2, photo 3)
    Stamps in Class

"From Stargazers to Starships" is a self-contained course for high schools and undergraduate non-calculus classes, covering astronomy, Newtonian mechanics and spaceflight (see abstract of workshop at this meeting). The basic idea is to attract the interest of students by using examples and applications from space exploration and from the history of science. It is now on the world wide web at http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sintro.htm and it includes lesson plans, a math course and much more. This talk will describe the material and illustrate the underlying ideas. See also "The Physics Teacher", February 1999, p. 102-3.     (photo)
    From Stargazers to Starships
    The Exploration of the Earth's Magnetosphere

When teaching applied physics courses such as geophysics, commercially-available equipment is often prohibitively expensive. In addition, commercial equipment can become a "black box" situation with the inner workings hidden from the novice. The basic theory and practice of the geophysical method of electrical resistivity will be presented along with instructions (and a parts list) for building a resistivity apparatus that yields data of appropriate quality for an introductory geophysics course.     (photo 1, photo 2, photo 3)

I'll report on some physics education research involving two-year college students. Using questionnaires, I surveyed introductory physics students about how they study, and about how they would advise a hypothetical student to study if she were trying to learn physics deeply, with no grade pressure. The survey teases apart students' beliefs about learning and understanding physics from their course-specific beliefs about how to earn high grades. Two results emerged.

First, even in courses taught by reform-minded professors, students perceive "trying to understand physics well" to be a significantly different activity from "trying to do well in the course." I'll discuss why this is and what we can do about it.

Second, it's no surprise that students' performance correlates with their study habits; people who focus more on concepts and less on formulas earn better grades. But students' grades correlate even *more* strongly with how they advise the hypothetical student to study. In other words, if you want to predict a student's success in your class, you'll learn more by probing what he thinks it means to learn and understand physics than you'll learn by assessing his study habits. I'll discuss how this result can help us improve the techniques we use to nudge students away from formula-centered and towards concept-centered study habits.     (photo 1, photo 2)
PowerPoint presentation (0.7Mb)

In the presentation, I will show a new method for computing the thermal conductivity for a paper bowl. A combination of experimental and analytical work will be shown. Furthermore, a video of the experiment showing how to cook an egg in a paper bowl will be available at the meeting. The author idea is when putting water in a paper bowl, the water with its high specific heat will absorb enough heat to boil the egg before the paper catch a fire, and finally an energy balance is used to compute the thermal conductivity of the paper, to the author's knowlege,something never been done before.     (photo 1, photo 2)

Immediately following Lunch Break, Bill Ingham presiding     (photo)

Reports

Secretary's Report (David Wright) -- Minutes of Spring 1999 meeting     (photo)

Awards Committee Report (Harry Bates)     (photo)

Treasurer's Report (David Schaefer)     (photo)

Prizes for Best Papers of Morning (George Spagna)     (photo)

Other Reports

President's Report (Bill Ingham)     (photo)

Spring 2000 Meeting will be April 14-15 at Mary Washington College

    Local Contact: George King, III

    Watch the website for further details

Old Business

New Business

Election of Officers for 1999-2000 (Harry Bates, Nominating Committee Chair)

Recognition of meeting host

Other new business

"http://www.physics.udel.edu/csaapt/Fall1999/abstracts.html"
Last updated Nov. 14, 1999.