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Register a new userA New Lecture-Tutorial for Teaching Interferometry to Astro 101 Students
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The ground-breaking image of a black holes event horizon, which captured the publics attention and imagination in April 2019, was captured using the power of interferometry: many separate telescopes working together to observe the cosmos in incredible detail. Many recent astrophysical discoveries that have revolutionized the scientific communitys understanding of the cosmos were made by interferometers such as LIGO, ALMA, and the Event Horizon Telescope. Astro 101 instructors who want their students to learn the science behind these discoveries must teach about interferometry. Decades of research show that using active learning strategies can significantly increase students learning and reduces achievement gaps between different demographic groups over what is achieved from traditional lecture-based instruction. As part of an effort to create active learning materials on interferometry, we developed and tested a new Lecture-Tutorial to help Astro 101 students learn about key properties of astronomical interferometers. This paper describes this new Lecture-Tutorial and presents evidence for its effectiveness from a study conducted with 266 Astro 101 students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Quantum computing is a growing field at the intersection of physics and computer science. The goal of this article is to highlight a successfully trialled quantum computing course for high school students between the ages of 15 and 18 years old. This course bridges the gap between popular science articles and advanced undergraduate textbooks. Conceptual ideas in the text are reinforced with active learning techniques, such as interactive problem sets and simulation-based labs at various levels. The course is freely available for use and download under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
This paper reports on an investigation into the correlations between students understandings of introductory astronomy concepts and the correctness and coherency of their written responses to targeted Lecture-Tutorial questions. We assessed the correctness and coherency of responses from 454 college-level, general education, introductory astronomy students enrolled in courses taught in the spring of 2010, 2011, and 2012. We hypothesized that students who consistently provided responses with high levels of correctness and coherency would outperform students who did not on multiple measures of astronomy content knowledge. We compared students correctness and coherency scores to their normalized gains on the Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory (LSCI) and to their scores on closely-related exam items. Our analysis revealed that no significant correlations exist between students correctness and coherency scores and their LSCI gain scores or exam item scores. However, the participant group in our study did achieve high scores on the LSCI and on closely-related exam items. We hypothesized that these differences are due to the discussions that take place between students which suggests that instructors who teach with active engagement instructional strategies should focus their implementation on ensuring that their students fully engage in the richest possible discourse.
We designed a Physics Teaching Lab experience for blind students to measure the wavelength of standing waves on a string. Our adaptation consisted of modifying the determination of the wavelength of the standing wave, which is usually done by visual inspection of the nodes and antinodes, using the sound volume generated by a guitar pickup at different points along the string. This allows one of the blind students at our University to participate simultaneously as their classmates in the laboratory session corresponding to the wave unit of a standard engineering course.
We report on our ongoing efforts to develop, implement, and test VR activities for the introductory astronomy course and laboratory. Specifically, we developed immersive activities for two challenging 3D concepts: Moon phases, and stellar parallax. For Moon phases, we built a simulation on the Universe Sandbox platform and developed a set of activities that included flying to different locations/viewpoints and moving the Moon by hand. This allowed the students to create and experience the phases and the eclipses from different vantage points, including seeing the phases of the Earth from the Moon. We tested the efficacy of these activities on a large cohort (N=116) of general education astronomy students, drawing on our experience with a previous VR Moon phase exercise (Blanco (2019)). We were able to determine that VRbased techniques perform comparably well against other teaching methods. We also worked with the studentrun VR Club at San Diego State University, using the Unity software engine to create a simulated space environment, where students could kinesthetically explore stellar parallax - both by moving themselves and by measuring parallactic motion while traveling in an orbit. The students then derived a quantitative distance estimate using the parallax angle they measured while in the virtual environment. Future plans include an immersive VR activity to demonstrate the Hubble expansion and measure the age of the Universe. These serve as examples of how one develops VR activities from the ground up, with associated pitfalls and tradeoffs.
We design a Teaching laboratory experience for blind students, to measure the linear thermal expansion coefficient of an object. We use an open-source electronic prototyping platform to create interactive electronic objects, with the conversion of visual signals into acoustic signals that allow a blind student to participate at the same time as their classmates in the laboratory session. For the student it was the first time he managed to participate normally in a physics laboratory.
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