At the heart of a studio course is active learning. While developing a studio course, I tend to review my prior lecture notes while asking: “Instead of simply talking about a particular learning goal, how can I change it into an activity or sequence of activities?” The focus of class time is predominately on USING physics.

Does this mean the there are no lectures? No! Depending on the instructor, I have seen a variety of balances struck between lectures (or discussions) and activities. Some would argue that in order to fully leverage an active learning environment, such discussions ought to be minimized in order to maximize active learning opportunities during class time. I have seen other instructors strike more of a balanced approach to discussions versus activities.

Personally, I do acknowledge that lectures can be one of many modes that have their place. I tend to use discussions in two possible ways: brief introduction to a topic (ideally, the students will have already read about the relevant topics prior to class) and as a wrap-up to bring everyone together and transition to the next learning goal(s). However, I do try to place the emphasis on the activities and view the discussions as brief interludes between activities. Indeed, my rule of thumb on discussions is to restrict them to ~10-15 minutes or less.

With the exception of extensive laboratory activities, I tend to focus on frequent changes of modes. There are a variety of activity types, and I like to employ several different types for learning goals. In my experience, this seems to keep the pace of the class at a reasonable level (I find that my students tend to steadily disengage if I remain in one mode for too long). Aside from discussions, there are other types of activities. Broadly speaking, group activities tend to fall into two categories: Ponderables and Tangibles.

One of the larger challenges to developing a studio course is the need to have a large assortment of activities. To help instructors with the creation of their archive of activities, below are lists of various resources. Of course, many instructors tend to generate their own activities as well. If you do so, then I would invite you to share them as many have below! Both on the SCALE-UP website and on the PhET project website, instructors have uploaded suggested activities.  

PONDERABLES

A group of students work together to solve a qualitative or quantitative problem. Hence, the problems can include items that are conceptual, numerical, and computational in nature. There are many resources that can be useful for ponderables. Aside from the studio course archives, a few other resources to consider are:

1) PhET project at the University of Colorado: On this website, you will find many free, on-line simulations that can be used in a variety of ways. Linked to the pages of the individual simulations, you will find resources uploaded by instructors, who teach at various levels. These simulations have also been examined in lieu of tangible experiments in undergraduate laboratory courses (Finkelstein, et al., 2005).

Finkelstein, N.D., Adams, W.K., Keller, C.J., Kohl, P.B., Perkins, K.K., Podolefsky, N.S., Reid, S., LeMaster, R. (2005). “When learning about the real world is better done virtually: a study of substituting computer simulations for laboratory equipment”, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 1, 010103.

For more on-line simulations, see the ActivPhysics website, Physlets website, and the Open Source Physics website.

2) North Carolina State University’s Matter and Interactions based courses have also integrated computational physics using VPython. VPython is a free programming language that allows students to create powerful simulations with a reasonably simple set of commands - essentially, the student must “tell” the computer about the physics for the simulation and the computer creates a powerful graphical output of the simulation (hence, the student focus is primarily on the physics as opposed to wrestling with syntax). This approach allows the student to tackle problems computationally (such as the three or more body problem). For more information, see Scherer, et al. (2000).

Scherer, D., Dubois, P., and Sherwood, B. (2000). VPython: 3D interactive scientific graphics for students. Computing in Science and Engineering, 2(5), 56-62.

3) The University of Maryland’s Physics Education Research Group also provides many useful resources. They offer several collections of problems.

4) The University of Minnesota’s Physics Education Research and Development Group provides information on context-rich problems, which have a different nature from traditional end-of-chapter problems. For example, students might be asked to design something, given some specifications.

5) Alan Van Heuvelen’s Active Learning Problem Sheets (ALPS) Kits are collections of many qualitative and quantitative problems spanning Mechanics and E&M topics. Van Heuvelen, A. (1996). ALPS: Mechanics (Vol. 1), Electricity and Magnetism (Vol. 2), Hayden-McNeil Publishing: Westland, MI.

6) The University of Washington’s Tutorials in Introductory Physics is an inquiry-based instructional supplement. McDermott, L.C., Shaffer, P.S., and the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington (2002). Tutorials in Introductory Physics, Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ.

7) Problem-Based Learning (PBL) designs courses around student projects, which require the use of course concepts to solve. A few related resources are listed below (given the nature of some of the projects, one could argue PBL could also fall into the tangibles category):

        PBL from McMaster University

Project-Based Physics from David Weaver at Chandler-Gilbert Community    

College

PBL from Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction

PBL from Collegial Centre for Educational Materials Development (CCDMD)

8) There are a couple of on-line collections of the well-known Paul Hewitt materials (http://www.arborsci.com/Labs/CP_NTQ.aspx, http://dev.physicslab.org/Compilations/NextTime.aspx).

POLLING QUESTIONS

In a sense, polling questions are a subset of ponderables. Polling questions (or “clicker” questions or personal response questions as they are otherwise known) are multiple-choice questions that an instructor presents to the class. The students have a remote control, typically called a “clicker”, which has buttons corresponding to the possible answers to the multiple choice question. The students register their votes by pressing the appropriate button on their clicker. The instructor’s computer is connected to a base station that receives the votes, and the computer stores the responses for subsequent analysis. Some places will provide a class-set of clickers while others require the students to purchase their own clicker.

       

Typically, the students initially answer individually, then the instructor might ask the students to discuss their answers with their team and reach a consensus (especially if there is more than one popular answer). Such an activity provides immediate feedback for the instructor (allowing the instructor to make adjustments in real-time to better serve the class).

An alternative implementation that I have used while at North Carolina State University (NCSU) involves the use of an on-line based system, called WebAssign. Due to the unusual shape of the studio room at NCSU, early clickers are not feasible for use. However, each student’s station had a computer, so they would instead log into the on-line system and submit their responses through WebAssign. This system had the added benefit (not available with typical clicker systems) to include an essay blank, so I could also ask the students to enter a brief passage explaining their reasoning as well.

Some useful resources for polling questions are:

1) Mazur, E. (1997). Peer Instruction, Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ.

2) The University of Maryland’s Physics Education Research Group also offers a set of Peer Instruction questions.

3) The Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia links to a host of resources, spanning instructor guides to polling question collections.

4) There are many interesting and useful experiment videos from the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) materials.

5) Of course, YouTube is another fun source of videos and Google also hosts an interesting collection of images to browse through for inspiration.

6) The aforementioned PhET project website’s instructor materials also includes archives of polling (or clicker) questions.

TANGIBLES

Tangibles involve the use of laboratory equipment or even everyday objects (such as a baseball). Tangibles can span from brief investigations to extensive laboratory experiments. A few programs have posted archives of their studio course activities, where many tangibles can be found.

1) North Carolina State University’s Student Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) website offers archives of activities from various institutions who have adopted SCALE-UP courses. As noted on the website, instructors will need to request access to the members area from Dr. Robert Beichner at North Carolina State University. Note that membership is free.

2) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has also developed a studio course program, called Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL). There are some TEAL archives available through MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

3) University of New Hampshire has also provided archives of their materials for studio courses that integrate teaching calculus and physics in a unified course.

4) Another resource to consider is the Physics Suite of materials:

    Redish, E.F. (2003). Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite, John Wiley and

    Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ.

    Sokoloff, D.R. and Thornton, R.K. (2004). Interactive Lecture

    Demonstrations, John Wiley and Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ.

    Sokoloff, D.R. and Thornton, R.K. (2004). RealTime Physics, John Wiley    

    and Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ.

5) Some programs that have moved away from traditional “cookbook” style labs have also posted archives of their activities on-line as well. For example, see activities from the University of Minnesota and University of Maryland.

6) Two popular journals periodically offer interesting ideas for activities as well: American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher.