AAPT Section News, July 2013
—Page 8
Minnesota Section
The 2013 Spring Meeting of the Minnesota Area Association
of Physics Teachers was held on Saturday April 27, 2013
at Bethel University. About 50 students and teachers were
in attendance. There were 10 talks and 13 posters on topics
ranging from lasers to black holes to undergraduate physics
laboratories to biological monolayers. For the first time, four
of the posters came from high school students.
Prizes (gift certificates to Barnes and Noble) were awarded
for the best student oral and poster presentations. The award
for the best oral presentation went to Curtis Heyda of Bethel
University for his talk “Single Slit to Double Slit Transitions”
describing an experiment to observe the transition between
single and double slit interference patterns using a movable
barrier. The award for the best poster presentation went to
Travis Neumann and Ben Sather from Henry Sibley High
School for their poster “Carbon-fiber hockey sticks: Does flex-
rating affect slapshot speed?” in which they used high speed
video to measure hockey stick deflections and resulting puck
speeds during slapshots.
Books from the national AAPT were given away as door
prizes.
At this meeting, it was decided by general consensus that
the MAAPT would eliminate its fall meeting for the forseeable
future, holding only one meeting a year in the spring.
Attendance by members at the Wisconsin section’s meeting
(which occurs in the Fall) would be encouraged and perhaps
ties between the two sections could be strengthened.
—Michael Faleski, Section Representative
New York Section
We scheduled a joint meeting with the New York State
section of APS for October 2011. We have had a number
of joint meetings in the past and they were very successful.
This meeting was planned by APS with little involvement
by AAPT. The result was that only one 60 minute workshop
was of interest to our members. Less than half dozen
AAPT members attended.
After some discussion, the Board was re-organized and
a section meeting was held in April 2012. The meeting was
held at the Anheuser-Busch plant, located just outside of
Syracuse. About thirty people attended. The first session
was devoted to a discussion of the future of the section.
The morning concluded with a two-hour Ranking Tasks
workshop presented by Steve Henning and a Make and
Take by Sam Sampere. After lunch, we toured the world’s
most modern brewery and its amazing computer controlled
robotic warehouse.
Our Fall Meeting, held in November of 2012, was held
at Marist College in Hyde Park NY, and organized by
Robert Robinson. The program included 13 paper sessions,
a PTRA workshop, and a Hot Air Balloon Make and Take.
About 40 teachers attended the meeting.
Our next meeting is scheduled for April 2013 in
Rochester. This will be an election year.
—John Fitzgibbons, Section Representative
North Carolina Section
The 18th Annual Fall Meeting of the North Carolina
Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers
was held November 16-17, 2012 at High Point University
in Greensboro, NC. Newly elected four-year college and
university representative to the AAPT, Aaron Titus, was one
of our hosts. The theme of the meeting was the “Physics
of Everyday Life.” The theme could have been “flipping
the meeting” as the meeting emphasized workshops,
posters and “flipping the classroom.” This focus included
discussions of simulations for feature films, new building
materials to save on energy costs, microelectronics, and
optics for medical devices. There was a poster session,
a panel discussion with industrial physicists, multiple
workshops, and a teaching share-a-thon.
The Friday night keynote speaker was Dr. Jerry
Tessendorf, Professor of Visual Computing, and Director of
the Digital Production Arts program at Clemson University.
His talk, “I’m Ready for My Close-up Mr. Newton,”
described film-making advantages and disadvantages of
the choice of computer algorithm. On Saturday morning,
Dr. Jerry Tessendorf spoke again, this time discussing the
application and manipulation of physical concepts for fluid
dynamics, clouds, and light propagation in the movie, The
A Team in: “I Love it When a Cloud Comes Together.”
Following this invited talk were “workshop” style
parallel sessions on: role-playing “The Pluto Debate” in
the classroom, high speed imaging, and teaching kinematic
graphs using mobile robots. After the workshops was the
concurrent Society of Physics Student’s panel discussion
with industrial physicists (and Thomas Olsen, Assistant
Director of SPS & Sigma Pi Sigma) and the NCS-AAPT
Invited Talk, “What’s class time for?” by Professor Andy
Rundquist of Hamline University. Professor Rundquist
described his experiences with “flipping” a classroom
and made suggestions on what worked and what does not
work. Lunch was concurrent with the poster session of
16 student and faculty posters. After lunch and the poster
session was the second set of “workshop” style parallel
sessions on: so how do you flip a class?, a modeling meetup
—a gathering of modelers, and hacking for humanity—
building an inexpensive amplitude modulated laser. The
meeting ended with a Teaching Share-a-thon which was a
“figurative buffet of great ideas where teachers share their
favorite videos, demos, lessons, experiments, simulations,
interesting homework problems, pedagogical innovations,
or any other teaching tip.” Nine NCS-AAPT members
shared their ideas in the share-a-thon.
