Cerne Page-Teaching

My goal is to make learning and teaching more interactive and interesting, and thereby more effective. Students learn by thinking and making connections, and unfortunately not much time is dedicated to these processes in traditional lectures. My efforts have focused on three areas:

*Development of new lecture demonstrations that engage students

*Graphical interactive simulations to help students learn basic concepts

*Magneto-polarimetry laboratory course

Lecture Demonstrations

My work in improving lecture courses consists of two parts. First, I have used active engagement techniques such as Mazur's Peer Instruction to increase student participation in lecture. Since 2007, I have been using a personal response system in my Physics 207 course, which typical consists of about 200 students. Although the pressure to get through all the material is very great, I have made a conscious effort to continually ask the class questions, and actually wait long enough for them to answer. I also have found it very useful to take polls of the class to determine whether they understood the concept that has been or will be covered. The second part involves adding new content, improving old lecture demonstrations and creating new ones, both real and virtual. For example, I have developed a new course that expands on the limited amount of quantum mechanics that is taught in Physics 20. I taught this course for two years and now that we have more physics faculty would like to formalize it into an honors Physics 207 course. I have also added new demonstrations. These demonstrations range from simple to spectacular and have helped make lecture worth attending. I have even given experimental demonstrations as well as computer simulations in upper division electromagnetism (403/503 and 404/504) where typically no lecture demos are given.

For example, I developed a new demo to teach the concepts involved in radio-active decay. Each student tosses a coin to simulate a collection of radioactively decaying atoms is one of the most popular demos that I have designed and shows that one can involve the entire class in the lecture. In this demonstration, each student is given a penny. All the pennies begin with the head side up. Then the students toss their pennies and the number of remaining heads is recorded and projected on the lecture screen using MathCad (software for mathematical modeling and plotting) or Microsoft Excel. The toss is repeated for the coins that are still heads, and the new number of remaining heads is recorded and plotted in real time on a semilog plot. The data are then fitted to an exponential decay that is used to determine the half-life (the number of tosses required for half the pennies to still remain as heads) of the tossed pennies. The figure below shows the results from an actual class that involved 83 Physics 207 students in the spring of 2003. The data fit the theoretical exponential curve quite well and the result ( = 1.44) is within 1 % of the predicted result. This is a demonstration where having a large class is beneficial in minimizing statistical fluctuations.

One of the keys to presenting the lecture demos is to have the students commit to a prediction of what they think will happen, and then to step through the demo to make it very clear why their predictions were right or wrong. Studies have found that students tend to bias their observations to support their expectations, and unless strongly forced otherwise will remember a demonstration to support those expectations even if the demo behaved in exactly the opposite way than they expected.

Conceptual Learning Approach to Waves

In addition to using computer simulations in lecture to bring life and hopefully a clearer picture of concepts, I am developing new interactive web-based simulations to explain basic concepts. The effort began with Java programs that I wrote to explain the polarization of light and is now continuing in an extended collaboration with a local high school teacher Frank Nappo to develop CLAW (Conceptual Learning Approach to Waves). The goal of this project is to have an exciting interactive web site that can be used by the public to gain insight into waves and polarized light.

Part of the problem is that waves are typically explained using static and non-interactive pictures or perhaps only mathematical equations. In CLAW we have attempted to explain many basic wave concepts using dynamic and interactive graphical simulations. There are many excellent web sites using similar graphical interactive tools, but they tend to focus on mechanics, electrostatics, and magnetism. The visual interactive approach emphasizes the basic concepts a nd we hope that students will gain a new perspective on these important and exciting topics.

Below are two examples of the simulations that can be found on CLAW. Please check out CLAW to learn more about waves!

Animation showing an electro-magnetic wave.

Interactive simulation showing how different polarizations add to produce new polarizations. Click run button and change amplitudes and phase of added waves to create a new wave.

Magneto-polarimetry laboratory course and other educational resources

I have been actively involved in our Advanced Lab course, where each experimentalists in our faculty creates and runs a modern lab module that is used by upper division undergraduate and junior graduate students. I have helped to lead efforts to modernize these labs by interfacing them with computers and modern software. I have created two new labs since coming to UB. The first lab involved measuring the temperature dependence of the Hall angle in high temperature superconductors. In 2005, I replaced this lab with one that is closer to my current research interests. The new lab involves measuring the magnetization of a film using polarized light. As a researcher who works closely with optical systems, I think this lab is particularly useful as it is the only one that allows students to set up optical and polarization components to study real samples (in this case magnetostrictive films that were grown by Dr. Anderson's group in UB's Electrical Engineering Dept. as part of my collaboration with them) on an optical table similar to the ones found in any optical research laboratory. To get a better sense of this lab please check my magneto-polarimetry manual for Advanced Lab. The Hall effect in high temperature superconductors manual for Advanced Lab is also available online.


If you are interested interested in Fourier analysis and how lockin amplifiers work, please check out this link: Lockin Detection and Fourier Analysis