Physics (13) This project builds on experience with Studio Physics, an integrated lecture-laboratory format, a technology-enhanced learning environment, collaborative group work, and a high level of faculty-student interaction. The project is leveraging new hardware and software that, when connected to a PC via a USB port, provides functionality similar to that of the laboratory equipment currently used in an instrumented classroom -- at an affordable cost for individual students to own. With guidance from their instructors, students devise their own experimental procedures for each given problem, test their ideas in class, and then each student completes the activity outside of class with his/her personal PC-based instrumentation set at his/her choice of time and place. Students are able to perform hands-on experiments anywhere/anytime, thus facilitating new opportunities for them to tinker and gain valuable insight through practical experience.
Six take-home activities for Physics I (mechanics) and five for Physics II (electromagnetics and circuits) are being designed, developed and implemented in physics and engineering courses at Rensselaer and partner institutions. An evaluation activity is guided by assessment experts from the Evaluation Consortium at the State University at Albany to assess what impact project outcomes have on student learning. Collaborators from the partnering schools are participating in an exchange program in which faculty teach the course content at both their home institution and at the partner''s, as well as participate in a K-12 classroom outreach program.
The intellectual merit of the project is to leverage Rensselaer-developed educational technology in order to extend hands-on activities beyond the classroom. The project is producing a valuable set of vetted resources and pedagogy that can be widely adopted by other institutions.
The broader impacts of this project include providing students the ability to perform and further explore experiments at their own pace anywhere/anytime while additionally providing physics teachers (as well as general STEM teachers) with innovative educational technology to utilize in/out of the classroom. Hands-on activity can produce powerful student engagement.
