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Tuesday afternoon
“Green Peas,” which were discovered by Galaxy Zoo volunteers in 2007.
I will highlight elements of the scientific research process they used to
characterize these as a new class of object, and explain identify common
themes that can be used to encourage further serendipitous discoveries in
other projects.
PST2D07: 5-5:45 p.m. Simulating and Stimulating the Social
Production of Science Knowledge
Poster – Daniel Doucette, International School of Latvia, 2 Meistaru iela Pinki,
LV-2107 Latvia;
Physics is at its most exciting when international teams are collaborat-
ing and competing to understand new ideas, but the social component
of science has long been overlooked. Ford
1
suggests that constructivist
approaches to science education fall short unless they pair model construc-
tion with appropriate critique. I attempt to bring these together in The
Science Game, an extracurricular simulation of cutting-edge research. We
asked students to investigate the properties of fat globules in milk, as seen
under a microscope. The students developed knowledge claims based on
Toulmin’s Argument Patterns.
2
These claims, along with the data and war-
rant, were distributed and critiqued using symposia, pre-prints, a journal,
and informal communication. I will give an overview of the students’ work
and evaluate the effectiveness of this approach for learning both knowledge
and “grasp of practice”.
1
1. Michael Ford, “Disciplinary authority and accountability in scientific practice and
learning,”
Sci. Educ.
92
.3 (2008), 404-423.
2. Sibel Erduran, Shirley Simon, and Jonathan Osborne, “TAPping into argumenta-
tion: Developments in the application of Toulmin’s argument pattern for studying
science discourse,”
Sci. Educ.
88
.6 (2004): 915-933.
E – Technology Posters
PST2E01: 5-5:45 p.m. What Can We Learn from Student
Interactions with MasteringPhysics?
Poster– Marina Malysheva, Rutgers University, 2209 Sayre Dr., Princeton,
NJ 08540;
Michael Gentile, Eugenia Etkina, Rutgers University
Students in a reformed introductory physics course at Rutgers University
work on their weekly homework assignments online, using a web-based
learning environment (an interactive tutoring system MasteringPhysics).
The system allows you to assign tasks of different types, and to provide
different levels of scaffolding. For this study, we focused on a specific type
of task, called a tutorial. The tutorials provide a high degree of support,
leading students through a sequence of sub-tasks, and providing hints (if
requested by the student), an immediate answer-specific feedback, and
follow-up comments. The system collects data about student performance
and student-system interaction. We report the results of our analysis of
these data, and discuss the important lessons we have learned during
the first year of using this system, and possible ways to use our results to
improve the course.
PST2E02: 5:45-6:30 p.m. Learning Physics with MinecraftEDU
Poster – Michele McColgan, Siena College, Loudonville, NY 12211;
Minecraft is a popular sandbox game. Tutorials in MinecraftEDU allow
students to quickly navigate, interact, and build within the game and
learn the skills they need to participate in activities and lessons within the
game. MinecraftEDU includes built-in tools to quickly create worlds for
teachers to create a learning environment for students on different topics.
As students become more proficient, comparisons between physics in
the Minecraft world and the real world become obvious. Is there gravity
in Minecraft? Sometimes! How fast does a player walk or run? Can you
predict the flight of a projectile? Students can quickly build experiments
in MinecraftEDU to answer these questions. This poster will present tools
within MinecraftEDU that provide an opportunity for teachers to build
lessons within the game and for students to explore different physics topics
such as vectors, forces, momentum, circular motion, electric fields, mag-
netic fields, and so much more.
the direction of exhibition in children’s science museum that can satisfy all
the children with different intelligent profiles.
PST2D03: 5-5:45 p.m. History of the NJAAPT Physics Olympics
Poster – David P. Maiullo, Rutgers University, 136 Frelinghuysen Road,
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019;
The New Jersey Section of the AAPT has a long history of organizing a
successful Physics Olympics event for high schools in New Jersey. This
event was held once per year and had many schools across NJ participating
in it. The poster will detail the history, many of the events, a listing of the
winners, and many of the individuals who were responsible for the event’s
success, and evolution through the years.
PST2D04: 5:45-6:30 p.m. Student Models of Weather, Climate,
and Climate Change
Poster – Jignesh Mehta, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907;
Anita Roychoudhury, Andrew Hirsch, Daniel Shepardson, Purdue University
Climate change is an important challenge of our time but public under-
standing of it is limited at best. Newly released Next Generation Science
Standards (2013) suggests that climate change be taught from the middle
school level onward. We think that teaching of this complex topic needs
to begin with what students know about weather, climate, climate change,
and global warming. This exploration of student understanding needs to
be done at the level where climate change education is expected to begin.
To meet this need, we explored middle school students’ responses to open-
ended questions and constructed student models of these concepts. These
models have implications for curriculum development and instruction at
the secondary (7-12) grades.
PST2D05: 5-5:45 p.m. Physics and Having Fun: The Trebuchet
Poster – Joel C. Berlinghieri, The Citadel, Physics Department, Grimsley Hall,
Charleston, SC 29409;
The trebuchet is a siege engine that was developed in medieval times before
the laws of classical mechanics were developed. Yet the trebuchet is a
marvel of efficiency in converting potential energy into kinetic energy and
launching a projectile at the most optimum angle. Each year The Citadel
organizes a trebuchet contest involving kindergarten, elementary and
middle school, high school and college, and corporate divisions. The teams
compete within their division for projectile accuracy and distance, and for
team spirit (Medieval dress). There is also an advanced, invitation-only
Barbarian division for very large trebuchets. Trebuchet kits are supplied
to the kindergarten and elementary school divisions and financial support
to the upper school divisions. Workshop sections for teachers and college
and corporate teams are provided where the physics of the trebuchet is
explained, each according to background and skills of the participants.
Students, teachers, and other team members have fun building their trebu-
chet, measuring its efficiency, calibrating its adjustments for accuracy and
precision, and enjoying a day of competition.
*For the past four years support has been provided by a grant from the Google
Corporation.
PST2D06: 5:45-6:30 p.m. Give Peas a Chance: A Citizen Science
Discovery
Poster – Miranda C P Straub, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
55455-0213;
The Zooniverse is a suite of online citizen science projects that has
provided an opportunity for volunteers to contribute to science and
humanities research without requiring extensive training or expertise. It
uses crowd-sourcing methods to make independent classifications useful
to researchers on the science teams. Since the launch of the first Zooniverse
project in 2007, the organization has grown to more than 25 projects and
reached the 1,000,000 participant mark in early 2014. While the goal of
using volunteers for data processing has been successful, there have been
unexpected examples of genuine discoveries by citizen scientists along the
way. This talk will focus on the discovery of a class of galaxies called the
