Renewing Introductory Physics
Michael Fowler, Physics
2002 TTI Fellow
Email: mf1i@Virginia.EDU
Project website: (under construction)
My TTI project is to develop new materials to better instruct students in Physics 152, which is the weak link in the Physics Department's otherwise strong four-semester introductory course sequence for Physics Majors. Physics 152 covers several important nineteenth-century developments in understanding fluids, waves and heat. These topics are rather poorly treated in available textbooks, in part because real understanding of them comes through visualization, including how systems develop with time. The abilities of the computer to visualize time-based processes will be very helpful in this area.
The project will improve the course in four significant ways:
- A complete set of lecture notes is being written up and put on the web, with links to other relevant material.
- A series of interactive applets will be developed to illustrate various dynamic physical processes that have proved difficult for students to understand using traditional techniques.
- Students will learn to model physical phenomena using spreadsheets that will aid their understanding of differential equations and numerical methods.
- Developments in physics will be related to their historical and social context. This will be designed to lead to deeper understandings of physics since they will begin to see connections between what phenomena could be detected at each stage of technological development and how new theories emerge from work with new technological capabilities.
An example of the new lecture notes is available on the Web:
http://www.phys.virginia.edu/classes/152.mf1i.spring02/What%20is%20Heat.htm
This course, when completed, will complement the work I have done to create web accessible lecture notes and interactive applets for the other introductory courses for Physics Majors. (My earlier web notes for the fourth course in the sequence, Physics 252, are widely used to help teach Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and among the top choices on typing modern physics into Google.) Improvements to Physics 152 are important because it is usually taken before a student has committed to a major, and if it is not engaging, there is a real risk that the student will change to a new field.
The material in Physics 152 will be valuable basic knowledge for any Physics major who goes on to work in medical science, environmental sciences, or other applied physics fields. It does not address the ultimate questions of the origin of the universe or the structure of elementary particles, so it has less glitz than some areas of physics, but is a lot more relevant to the science problems facing society. Working with fluids, heat and waves helps develop intuition about what are the important parameters in a problem, and what can be safely ignored. These skills do not develop so readily in the more abstract areas of physics.
I have also found that students are fascinated by a more historical approach, demonstrating how new advances in physics related to other contemporary developments, and what thought processes led to new insight. Time and again I have found that this mirrors the students' own development of understanding, and it is very reassuring to them to discover how difficult it was for something now considered quite commonplace to be understood for the first time. It is unfortunate that almost all modern textbooks have eliminated historical material in favor of endless rather mechanical exercises. I see this as a real problem in keeping our more talented and motivated students interested in physics.