The Course:

This is the calc-based physics course (the first semester). The students in the class are mostly:

• Physics majors
• Chemistry majors
• Computer Science majors
• Math majors

I don’t think there are any other students that take this. OK, I guess you could include pre-engineering—but technically they are still physics majors.

For the textbook, I use the super alpha awesome book Matter and Interactions (Wiley – Chabay and Sherwood). If you’ve read my stuff, you should know that I LOVE this book (and Bruce Sherwood and Ruth Chabay are both great people to talk to). Here is my previous review.

Just a few highlights of the curriculum.

• Includes relativistic momentum and energy.
• Focus on fundamental interactions and fundamental particles.
• Ball and spring model of matter.
• Three big principles: momentum, work-energy, angular momentum.
• Explicit inclusion of numerical calculations.
• I use Standards Based Grading with options for students to submit reassessment videos.
• We often use multiple-choice questions in class with student response systems (clickers). Matter and Interactions has a nice set of questions to use.

Here is the course website.

The Good:

I always enjoy this course. The students are both diverse and great. They are at LEAST in Calc-I so that means they can probably do some algebra stuff. There are a good number of students that are in even more advanced math classes like Differential Equations and stuff. Oh, and it’s a great chance to get to know the new physics and chemistry majors.

The class isn’t too big (mine started around 30) so that it’s fairly easy to memorize names.

Maybe the best part of the class is watching student videos. OK, I really don’t like watching videos—it can get kind of boring. But I LOVE seeing students make terrible videos and then get better and start figuring things out. It’s awesome when students have never made a video and are afraid to do it, but then really get into it.

Students eventually figure out that I’m not just assessing their videos, but they are learning by making the videos.

One other thing I liked—I always like it: speed dating physics problem solving. Here is a twitter thread on speed dating (from another class).

THREAD. Class report on my experience with physics speed dating.

Note: there is no dating involved – just physics and problem solving and groups.

I am using @kellyoshea plan – https://t.co/Tdm60yZ1fN

— Rhett Allain (@rjallain) February 21, 2019

Also, I did assign and collect homework. I didn’t really grade it (I gave them a score), but it’s like free points and maybe it helps them practice.

One last “good”. I put together this video tutorial on numerical calculations that looks at an object falling on the surface of the moon. I think it’s pretty good. Not sure how much the students used it though.

The Bad:

Yes, there was some bad stuff. Sometimes I felt like students were just sitting there. Even when I was doing interactive activities, they had this blank stare (it seemed). Maybe it was the class time (9:30 AM)—although that doesn’t seem too early. I really don’t know what the problem was. For the most part they were fine.

Another big problem—speed dating. Oh, I get it. Students don’t want to participate. They want to just sit there and take in the fire hose of learning (they think that works). But in the end, most of them seem to get some positive things out of the speed dating. But the room was not super great for this. It’s a standard lecture hall—so I didn’t really have places to put boards. I tried using very small boards, but it just wasn’t perfect.

One final problem—a good number of student just never seemed to fully grasp numerical calculations.

The Future:

Here are some ideas for the future.

• Mounted white boards. If I have to be in that lecture hall, I want to find some ways to put boards somewhere around on the walls.
• Plickers. I’m ditching the TurningPoint clickers. I’m tired of constant updates that bork the system. I get it—they want me to upgrade. Not upgrading again. Oh, also with Plickers it shows the student name over their head when they vote.
• More in-class stuff. More group problem solving. More activities. More focus on numerical calculations.
• I should show the students more of the awesome physics (like stuff from my blog). I don’t do this enough because I get so busy with getting through different topics—but I think the students really like these things. Who cares anyway, it’s the stuff that I love.