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Building strong undergraduate communities effectively is important to student success. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and current social distancing guidelines, colleges and universities have had to adapt many of their normal activities, such as classes and club gatherings, to virtual platforms.&amp;nbsp; This may have students feeling more disconnected than normal, which has led the Society of Physics Students (SPS) to strategize building a sense of community within its members more now than ever.&amp;nbsp; With increased social media presence, utilizing the SPS Discord channel, organizing virtual talks, and more, SPS has worked to interact with our students and members to promote community engagement virtually. Learn about the SPS virtual initiatives and how you can get involved or implement them in your own community.

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Community Building with SPS - Virtually

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AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

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Building strong undergraduate communities effectively is important to student success. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and current social distancing guidelines, colleges and universities have had to adapt many of their normal activities, such as classes and club gatherings, to virtual platforms.&nbsp; This may have students feeling more disconnected than normal, which has led the Society of Physics Students (SPS) to strategize building a sense of community within its members more now than ever.&nbsp; With increased social media presence, utilizing the SPS Discord channel, organizing virtual talks, and more, SPS has worked to interact with our students and members to promote community engagement virtually. Learn about the SPS virtual initiatives and how you can get involved or implement them in your own community.

technical paper

A challenge that engineering students usually face when moving forward from an introductory physics course into a statics course concerns the resolution of trusses. The challenges include applying basic concepts on statics, such as identifying forces and drawing free-body diagrams on the trusses joints. This study explores students’ use of a visuohaptic truss simulation in a statics lab using three different modalities: visual, visuohaptic, and sequenced haptic+visuohaptic. While the visual simulation allowed students to observe the force’s magnitudes and directions, the visuohaptic simulation also allowed students to feel the forces acting in the members of a truss. Findings suggest that by providing visual and haptic feedback, students get to experience rich embodied experiences,&nbsp; fostering the development of richer mental representations of the topic, and transfer it to truss resolution. Learning through the haptic device fosters conceptual understanding and the correct use of force direction while solving exercises with trusses.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Visuohaptic Simulations enhancing learning in an applied physics course

A group of secondary students, learning geometrical optics using a computer simulation, was followed. The aim was to observe the students learning progression with a focus on their ability to draw correct rays in the formation of an optical image. The teaching was based on activities focused on testing hypotheses, supplemented by computer simulations. Each session started with the students individually predicting the answer of the task by drawing a ray diagram and explaining their reasoning in words. As the students were followed longitudinally, they increasingly exhibited signs of having developed&nbsp;a physically correct understanding.&nbsp;Their increased understanding of the formation of&nbsp;image&nbsp;points was exhibited in the students´ discussions. The students construction of rays improved&nbsp;from them being able to handle single rays, towards mastering multiple ray construction.&nbsp;The students discussions, transcribed from video recordings, show&nbsp;that the students&nbsp;focused on solving the tasks&nbsp;using multiple rays.

A case study of learning geometrical optics using multiple representations.

We discuss new experimental and analytical studies of the familiar pair of spring-coupled-pendulua (SCP). This system is frequently used to introduce eigenvalue analysis and coupled differential equations (1). We extend the tutorial value of the SCP by measuring and modeling energy “flow.” Specifically, we follow the time behavior of the system energy as it flows between kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy, and spring potential energy. We follow three different states: symmetric motion, the first normal mode, antisymmetric motion, the second normal mode, and mixed-mode motion modeled as a linear combination of the two normal modes. We compare our modeled behavior with experimental measurements we make using a simple, effective, and low-cost system (2).&nbsp; We use these studies to supplement an Applied Linear Algebra Course that involves hands-on measurement of dynamical systems and explorations that go beyond what is found in most textbooks.

Energy Flow in Spring Coupled Pendula: Measurements and Analysis

We present several ideas for alternative assessments in courses taught virtually. We will discuss video and photo assignment alternatives to exams, such as mini-lessons, photo blogs, and community-based learning, that allow students to engage with, and demonstrate their mastery of, course concepts. This is part of a series of talks stemming from the NextGen PET FOLC project. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant NSF DUE-1626496.

Assessment Options for Remote Learning: Alternatives to Traditional Exams

In online or flipped courses, instructors often assign asynchronous online lecture videos. However, in-classroom and synchronous lectures frequently include interactive elements such as clicker questions. The goal of this project is to create a set of Interactive Online Lectures that foster active learning in an asynchronous format. Six lecturers at four diverse institutions are creating and sharing the lecture videos and interactive elements for the first semester of an introductory calculus-based course. Each lecture consists of several short (5 to 8 minute) video lecture segments interspersed with required multiple-choice "clicker questions" designed to help students understand the lecture content. After submitting each answer, the student sees an explanation of why the answer is correct or incorrect. The lectures are currently being used at five institutions either as primary or supplementary materials. Sample lectures and instructions for signing up to use the lectures at no cost can be found at https://ivet.rit.edu/IOL.

Interactive Online Lectures with Clicker Questions

We have created a web-based, asynchronous, interactive, Get-the-Facts-Out activity for providing students with information about the benefits of a career teaching physics.&nbsp; The format enables us to provide the activity to multiple groups with minimal effort after initial implementation.&nbsp; Students in the gateway, third-semester physics course and several upper-level physics courses were assigned the activity as part of the physics major/minor career curriculum, as were students in educational studies courses. &nbsp; We will share preliminary data on the state of knowledge as students began the activity and on their self-reported learning and changes in attitude afterward.&nbsp;&nbsp; Earlier, not long after the US onset of the pandemic, we conducted a live, online, Get-the-Facts-Out presentation to faculty in all of the STEM departments and Educational Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

An Asynchronous, Interactive, Get-The-Facts-Out Activity and More

The Get the Facts Out Project is an ambitious effort to change the conversation around physics, chemistry, and math teacher recruitment.&nbsp; We are utilizing best practices from cognitive science, communications science, education research, and multimedia learning to create effective ways to persuade faculty to view the teaching profession with a new lens and to leave the door open to this great career option. Did you know that teachers in the United States rate their lives better than all other occupation groups, trailing only physicians? In this presentation we will share updates on our latest resources and research results including effective strategies for recruitment in a virtual world.&nbsp; This project is supported by NSF DUE-1821710.

Recruiting Physics Teachers in a Virtual World

We have developed and extensively tested written and visual teacher recruitment materials as part of the Get the Facts Out (GFO) project in an effort to correct the nation’s science and math teacher shortage. First, we worked with experts to develop taglines, sentences, and other written materials based on our research on perceptions of the teaching profession. Additionally, we identified appealing photos and videos related to teaching. Next, we tested and refined these materials over two years using faculty and student focus groups at several US universities. Recently, we began collecting large-scale data via a national online survey. Our results provide insights into optimal recruitment strategies, and we will share some of our unique findings based on location, demographics, and target audience.&nbsp;This project is supported by NSF DUE-1821710.

User Testing of Teacher Recruitment Videos, Images, and Other Materials

Teachers in the United States rate their lives better than all other occupation groups, trailing only physicians. Despite this fact, there is a shortage of secondary math and science teachers in this country. One reason for this disparity is a lack of accurate and positive information about the profession. To correct this disparity, the Get the Facts Out (GFO) project has developed research-based, user-tested materials that provide accurate messaging about teacher happiness, autonomy, and financial well-being. As part of this project which investigates how these resources can affect the number of math and science majors who pursue grade 7-12 teaching, we have collected in-person and virtual focus group data from students and faculty members at 6 universities from around the country. These results provide insight into perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching and into how GFO resources are being used in recruitment efforts. Implications for teacher recruitment will be discussed.

Teacher Recruitment: Focus Group Insights from Six Universities

Lewis University is in the first year of its PhysTEC Recruiting Grant, which is intended to help increase the number of physics teacher candidates. Lewis has a B.A. in Physics for High School Teaching Licensure and an M.A. in Secondary Education, and we have historically graduated&nbsp;one physics teacher per year on average. As part of this grant work, we are developing&nbsp;a new accelerated Bachelors in Physics to Masters in Secondary Education track.&nbsp;We are&nbsp;also modifying Get the Facts Out materials to reflect&nbsp;data from the Chicagoland region and are using these materials&nbsp;to&nbsp;educate faculty about high school physics teaching as a career, to recruit current majors at the University into physics teaching, and to recruit high school and community college students. This presentation will discuss these efforts, including how we have modified our recruiting plans to engage these groups remotely due to the pandemic.

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