2027 AAPT Winter Meeting Workshops
AAPT is offering a variety of workshops in association with the 2027 AAPT Winter Meeting. All workshops will take place on Saturday, January 9, 2027, from 8:00 AM–12:00 PM at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside. This is a great opportunity to gather with colleagues, explore new teaching techniques, and engage in thoughtful discussion. Be sure to register early, as workshops can fill up quickly.
Cost: Half-day workshops (four hours) are $75 for members and $100 for non-members. There is an additional $85 fee to register for a workshop if you are not registering for the 2027 AAPT Winter Meeting.
Laptops & Devices: Some workshops require participants to bring a laptop or other device. Please review the individual workshop descriptions below for specific requirements.
Continuing Education Units (CEU): Earn 0.50 CEUs for attending a half-day AAPT workshop.
Physics with Phones
Organizer: Dan Burns
Using advanced sensors integrated into smartphones, participants will be guided through dozens of experiments and activities with emphasis on fluids, waves, sound, electromagnetism, and magnetism. These experiments will showcase the wide range of applications made possible by the technology in their phones. The experiments are suitable for both high school and introductory university physics courses. Participants will receive a kit with materials for the experiments. The Physics with Phones curriculum can be accessed at this website: https://st.llnl.gov/sci-ed/Physics-with-Phones.
What to Bring: A laptop and a smartphone.
Teaching Waves through Sound and Acoustics
Organizer: Gordon P. Ramsey
Co-organizers: Keeta Jones and Traci Neilsen
This workshop is for high school teachers who are interested in teaching waves using sound and materials that are readily available. This workshop will introduce teachers to acoustics kits and lesson plans that are presently available and satisfy the NGSS standards. Participants will initially receive kits and sample lesson plans for teaching waves. They will use the existing plans and kits to experiment and develop their own plans for use in their classrooms. Workshop leaders will present other demonstrations and online simulations that are useful in illustrating their effects on learning of wave concepts. They will leave the workshop with their kits, detailed information on resources available for teaching waves and other materials relevant to acoustics.
What to Bring: A laptop.
Particle Physics in the Classroom
Organizer: Shane Wood
Students who complete an introductory physics course may be under the impression that physics somehow “stopped” in the late 19th or early 20th century. Help them discover the frontier of 21st-century physics by integrating the excitement of CERN and Fermilab into your introductory course. This hands-on workshop demonstrates how to use Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data to teach fundamental practices, from conservation laws to statistical analysis. Participants will test-drive QuarkNet activities, detect cosmic ray muons in real-time, and analyze authentic particle physics data. Leave with a toolkit of activities connecting contemporary research to introductory physics.
What to Bring: A laptop.
OpenSpace: Creating Exciting Learning Experiences Inside the Classroom, the Planetarium, and Beyond
Organizer: Matthew Pappas
Stunning visual aids are a staple of astronomical presentations, whether they are delivered to a classroom full of students or a public audience. Thanks to a decade-long collaboration of institutions, astronomy educators now have access to a powerful, open-source universe simulator that runs on real-time data that they can use to create tailor-made tours of the universe for ourselves. In this workshop, participants will learn how to use Open Space to create visuals that will enhance the narratives they use when presenting topics related to Earth and space sciences, whether it’s taking an audience on a fly-through of the universe, highlighting features of the lunar surface in a classroom, or creating informative videos to post on social media.
What to Bring: Participants will need to provide their own laptops that meet the following minimum requirements to run the software: Windows 10+, i5 processor, NVIDIA 1060 GTX GPU (or compatible) graphics card, 8 GB RAM, 4 GB VRAM. It is strongly recommended that participants install the software onto their laptops prior to the workshop: https://www.openspaceproject.com/.
Adventures with Emmy: Playtest and Feedback
Organizer: Patrick Morgan
Co-organizers: Brian Lane
Adventures with Emmy (AwE) is an NSF-funded STEM education tabletop roleplaying game. Instead of playing a classic RPG class like a fighter or cleric, in AwE, you choose a field, like biologist, engineer, or mathematician. Each field brings its own unique play style and methods of solving problems, and you can customize your hero with abilities, a background, and an avocation. In this workshop, we will run a tutorial game session (no gaming experience required!) using our recently revised rule set, and discuss participants’ feedback to continue improving the gameplay-learning experience. Registration costs will be refunded out of our NSF grant.
What to Bring: A laptop or tablet.
Vibecoding for Physics Instruction: Birds-of-a-Feather and Wannabes
Organizer: Tom Loughran
Vibecoding is the generation of computer applications by giving clear instructions to Large Language Models (ChatGPT, etc.) This workshop is a birds-of-a-feather vibe-codathon. Complete beginners are especially encouraged to attend; those with more experience will be asked to divide time between their own coding projects and assistance to newer vibecoders. A checklist of vide-coding best practices will be distributed and illustrated just-in-time as coding progresses. Participants will wear both student and instructor hats, supporting the use of vibe-coding in classroom settings. 1-to-2-minute progress reports will be invited throughout.
What to Bring: A laptop with internet access and a mobile phone with the free Phyphox app installed.
Scaffolding Mathematical Sense-making in Physics
Organizer: Suzanne White Brahmia
Co-organizers: Trevor I. Smith
Applying mathematical concepts flexibly in physical contexts is key to student success. This process relies on Physics Quantitative Literacy (PQL) – the ability to reason mathematically to make sense of the physical world. This interactive workshop equips instructors to explicitly measure and foster PQL in introductory physics. Participants will first explore the PQL conceptual framework and learn to interpret results from the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL). Attendees will analyze student response patterns to diagnose reasoning bottlenecks regarding proportional reasoning, covariation, and signed quantities. The workshop then introduces research-validated instructional activities empirically shown to improve PQL. Participants will leave with a practical toolkit, including the PIQL, an interpretation framework, and classroom-ready activities designed to actively scaffold mathematical sense-making in physics.
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