Conference Session

Technology in the Physics Classroom

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Gerald Rothberg, Stevens Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics & Physics

using sometechnological innovations in a one semester course in modern physics for sophomore engineeringstudents. That paper compared results from two semesters before using the technology with onesemester using it. In this paper results are given for two additional semesters. Data for 233 pre-project students and 298 project students are now available. Several important aspects of theconduct of the course were changed during this time, so the conclusions from the data aresomewhat subjective. Nevertheless, others contemplating using similar technology might findthe discussion useful. The technology has made it possible to increase conceptual understandingwhile making a small improvement in grades. The best students did significantly better

Conference Session

Programmatic Issues in Engineering Physics

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Denise Martinez, Tarleton State University

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics & Physics

evidence as part of the Course Evaluation Form. • Peer Evaluations: In courses involving team projects, the students complete a team evaluation form (content at the discretion of the instructor) assessing the participation of their teammates and themselves in the project. • Concept Inventories are administered in as many courses as they are applicable, available, and desired by the instructor. Nationally normed exams such as the Mechanics Baseline Test provide a measure of relative performance. • Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam: Engineering Physics students are encouraged, but not required, to take the FE Exam. Student performance and pass rate data are kept. This also provides a measure of

Conference Session

Technology in the Physics Classroom

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Sabina Jeschke, University of Stuttgart; Olivier Pfeiffer, Technische Universitat Berlin; Thomas Richter, Technische Universitat Berlin; Harald Scheel, Technische Universitat Berlin; Christian Thomsen

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics & Physics

virtual knowledge spaces, and on the design of intelligent data analysis and validation schemes.Olivier Pfeiffer, Technische Universitat Berlin Olivier Pfeiffer received his M.Sc. in Mathematics at the Berlin University of Technology in 2002. His thesis in numerical mathematics investigated “Error Control using Adaptive Methods for Elliptic Control Problems in Matlab”. He has been working in several eLearning projects at the Berlin University of Technology, beginning as a student assistant in the Mumie project - a platform using new pedagogical concepts to support teaching of mathematics for mathematicians, engineers and natural scientists - at the Berlin University of Technology in

Conference Session

Technology in the Physics Classroom

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Gerald Rothberg, Stevens Institute of Technology; Pavel Boytchev, Sofia University

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics & Physics

libraries. Mainstream languages like C, Java,etc. come only with some low-level graphical capabilities. The side effect is that Elica requiresless time to implement virtual models. 2. Elica has a dynamic support. This means that when there is need to change Elica to providenew functionality for the SoftLab project it is possible to make this change. And several timesElica was changed to accommodate it to SoftLab. The developers of other languages will nevermake such changes in their implementations unless this change will be beneficial for a largenumber of users. 3. Elica is free. Page 12.1284.6 SoftLab is not yet ready for distribution. Its

Conference Session

Programmatic Issues in Engineering Physics

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Jonathan Bougie, American University; Philip Johnson, American University; Nathan Harshman, American University; Teresa Larkin, American University; Michael Black, American University

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics & Physics

introductory computer science. We include this requirementfor several reasons. First, it means that all graduating physics students know sufficientrudimentary programming to model experiments on computers. Second, by exposing physicsstudents to programming, the course has the potential to spark their interest in computationalphysics. Physics students constitute a significant portion of the enrollment in the introduction tocomputer science course, and the course is being partially adapted to this audience. Theseadaptations include recent student projects in modeling a physical system, and plans to teachMATLAB programming as well as Java in future offerings of this course.h. AU physics student feedbackIn addition to the above considerations, student