Conference Session

Engineering Physics and Physics Division Technical Session 4

Collection

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Authors

Paul Benjamin Crilly, U.S. Coast Guard Academy

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics and Physics

frequencies greater than 1 MHz, the ground losses are suchthat the signal will be severely attenuated. The amount of loss depends on the earth’sconductivity along that path. The surface wave is illustrated in Figure 1. (c) Troposphericbending, where dense air masses in the earth’s troposphere will cause refraction of radio waves.Occurance of tropospheric bending is a transient phenomenona, but sometimes enablescommunication distances of hundreds of mile at frequencies above 50 MHz [2]. (d) Reflectionand diffraction - the earth’s terrain or man-made objects can sometimes enable waves to travelbeyond the normal line of sight distances via diffraction or reflection[1,2].Ionosphere layers – Gas ionization is a process whereby a gas atom or molecule

Conference Session

Engineering Physics and Physics Division Technical Session 1

Collection

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Authors

Jessica R. Hoehn, University of Colorado, Boulder; Noah D. Finkelstein, University of Colorado, Boulder

Tagged Topics

Diversity

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics and Physics

a small effect of the intervention but note that the quantitativemeasures were high to begin with and thus they need to find alternative approaches to evaluatingthe impact of these activities. In this paper, we present examples of how we have attended tothese topics in our Modern Physics for Engineers class, and provide both qualitative andquantitative data as evidence of impact on individuals and the class as a whole.Daane, Decker, and Sawtelle [2] implemented a four-day equity unit in an introductory physicsclass to help students reflect on racial (in)equity in physics. Their course materials were designedspecifically for use in predominantly white settings. We draw on these materials in order toincorporate discussions about

Conference Session

Engineering Physics and Physics Division Technical Session 1

Collection

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Authors

Calvin S. Kalman, Concordia University; Franco La Braca, Concordia University; Mandana Sobhanzadeh, Mount Royal University

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics and Physics

discussing alternative ideas. The major goals of using labatorials in introductory physics labs are to improve theoverall student experience in the lab and to help students: (1) gain a better understanding ofphysics concepts; (2) investigate applications of physics principles in real life; (3) evaluate theirpreconceptions and compare them with their observation; and (4) interact with their peers and thelab instructor in a collaborative learning environment. The impact of labatorials in conjunction with reflective writing [11], an activity thatallows students to metacognitively examine textual material, on students’ epistemological beliefswas also explored by Author [12], and it was found that such a combination of interventions

Conference Session

Engineering Physics and Physics Division Technical Session 3

Collection

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Authors

Yumin Zhang, Southeast Missouri State University

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics and Physics

add more hidden layers, which is also reflected in biological evolution. For example, thecortex of turtles has three layers of neurons, but the human brain has six layers in the neocortex.The architecture with many hidden layers is called a deep neural network, and its operation iscorrespondingly called deep learning [5-6].One of the major applications of ML is on image recognition, where the data is in the two-dimensional (2D) format. If a traditional neural network is used, the 2D matrix needs to beflattened into a one-dimensional (1D) vector. In the 2D format, there are strong correlationsamong the neighboring pixels, but this important information becomes intricate in the 1D format.Therefore, a new approach was developed, which is called

Conference Session

Engineering Physics and Physics Division Technical Session 2

Collection

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Authors

Todd Zimmerman, University of Wisconsin

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics and Physics

activity. With a traditional homework problem studentswould go on to manipulate equations to get the correct result, then evaluate the validity of theiranswer. With computational modeling, the only difference is during the manipulation ofequations the student should let the computer do most of the work. Students write out the firstpart of the problem before they start modifying code. Students are encouraged to transition from amathematical description to a code model by rewriting the equations in terms of variable namesas pseudo-code before typing anything into the computer. The questions that make up the activitythen ask students to reflect on their results, which takes the place of the evaluation step whenworking homework problems.Great pains