You will learn how to author you own interactive physics simulations from scratch in HTML5, which is replacing Java and Flash as the dominant programming language of the web. In step-by-step exercises on your laptop computer you will experiment with how to draw and paint on the screen, how to use buttons, input fields, and sliders to allow the users to control your simulation parameters, how to work with images, and how to process mouse, touch, and keyboard inputs. Working step-by-step through instructive examples will allow you to create your own complete interactive simulations, which help your students gain physics insight.

Support gender equity in physics education through active strategies and discussions. Come to this workshop to learn how to be a part of a national campaign for high school physics teachers and their students, STEP UP for Women (Supporting Teachers to Encourage Pursuit of Undergraduate Physics for Women). During this workshop, learn about gender representation in physics in the U.S. and around the world, and engage in active strategies and two specific lessons that are demonstrated to enhance the physics identity of young women. If only one-third of high school physics teachers was able to recruit an interested young woman to a physics undergraduate program, gender imbalance upon enrollment would be offset. Undergraduate faculty have a special role to welcome and retain these young women. Whoever you might be, be a part of the change! (This workshop is fully funded by NSF #1720869. Participants who complete the workshop may seek full reimbursement of their workshop registration fee.)

LaTeX is the de facto standard for publication quality document preparation in mathematics and science, yet few students ever learn to use it because of its steep learning curve. In this workshop, I will introduce LaTeX within the context of physics for instructors and students at all levels, including the introductory level, but without the steep learning curve. Participants will construct both simple and more complex documents using Overleaf, an online LaTeX editing portal for which accounts are free. I will also describe how to install LaTeX locally. Participants are asked to have previously created a free Overleaf account at Overleaf.com and to bring a laptop or tablet.

Quantum mechanics is not only very different than classical physics, it also allows us perform tasks are impossible with today’s technology. This hands-on workshop is about the physics behind quantum cryptography – a mature technology allowing for unbreakable information security. Using affordable light polarizers, we will investigate two of the most fundamental quantum phenomena, namely the principles of quantum superposition and quantum measurement. We’ll then demonstrate how these quantum effects are leveraged to share a secret key between two parties in such a way that any attempt at eavesdropping will be detected.

In October 2017, the LIGO and VIRGO collaborations announced the discovery of GW170817 - the first direct observation of two colliding neutron stars. The collision was observed with gravitational waves followed by observations across the full range of the electromagnetic spectra. Observations over the following months provided evidence for the formation of r-process elements. The story of this discovery, and the physics concepts underlying it, is accessible to students and makes an excellent case study that incorporates Next Generation Science Standards in both physical science and earth/space science. Interspersing hands-on activities with video clips of scientists discussing their results can bring a sense of discovery into the classroom that students cannot get from textbooks.

Over the last few years, there has been a push to integrate computational modeling earlier in the physics curriculum. Participants will work activities used in a typical two-semester introductory physics course ranging from conceptual level to calculus-based level. We have been using Glowscript (http://www.glowscript.org), and this is the computational modeling tool we will be using in this workshop. Participants will learn some basic glowscript coding so that they can code some of activities used by the leaders in their classes. Several activities have been developed in conjunction with a series of workshops done as part of the ATE Physics Workshop Project and these will be shared with the participants. Additionally, we will discuss implementing computational modeling into your introductory physics classes. Participants are asked to bring their own laptops and have created an account on glowscript before arrival.

Instruction is an active-learning teaching method and a curriculum for physics, physics first (middle school or high school), chemistry, and biology that has been twice recognized by the US Dept. of Education as an exemplary curriculum. The Modeling Instruction project is a national program that has trained thousands of middle school, high school, and undergraduate science teachers in activity-based learning using guided-inquiry and problem-based learning techniques. Most teachers report that their students achieve statistically significant learning gains in annual progress and increased physics enrollment within 2-3 years of implementing Modeling Instruction in their classrooms. Both beginning and veteran physics teachers who would like to try a more activity-based approach will benefit from this workshop, which introduces the Modeling Instruction approach. The materials can be used to replace or supplement direct instruction. This workshop offers an overview and introduces the key points of Modeling Instruction to help faculty decide if one of the full workshops (1-3 weeks long) offered during the summer is worth their time and effort. For more information on Modeling Instruction including summer workshops, go the American Modeling Teachers Association Website at https://modelinginstruction.org.

Finding ways to make projects relevant to our students' interests, while also highlighting the material being presented, all while making sure everyone has fun at the same time can be a real challenge. In this hands-on session we'll look at some of the projects that NIU STEM Outreach has used in their camps to capture students' imaginations, while allowing them to demonstrate the skills and concepts being presented. But we won't just talk about the projects, attendees will actually get to create their own working* light sabers as we learn basic electronics and soldering. (*Light sabers may not actually cut through blast doors.)

In this workshop we will share many labs that are suitable for both high school and introductory college physics. The labs are challenging but not too difficult and, leave plenty of room for creativity! We have found success by limiting the goals for the labs to: 1. Fun and engaging, 2. Built in student choice, 3. Related to this week’s material. The labs are effective at engaging the students in problem solving and conceptual understanding. Merrell used this type of lab as a high school teacher and physics quickly became one of the most popular classes in the school. Adams, inspired by Merrell, has found that her college students no longer rush to leave, and in some cases stay to see how other groups do even after they’ve turned in their lab write up for the day! This workshop will allow you to try out these labs for yourself.

Learn about how the LIGO experiment uses interferometry to detect gravitational waves and study the result. We will put together an interferometer (you get to take home) and do other hands-on activities with LIGO physics. Bring your laptop to work with LIGO data. Bring a web cam if you would like to analyze diffraction data using video.

In this workshop we will discuss the importance of integrating computation into the physics curriculum and will guide participants in discussing and planning how they would integrate computation into their courses. The PICUP partnership has developed materials for a variety of physics courses in a variety of platforms including Python/VPython, C/C++, Fortran, MATLAB/Octave, Java, and Mathematica. Participants will receive information on the computational materials that have been developed, will discuss ways to tailor the materials to their own classes, and will learn about opportunities that are available to receive additional support through the PICUP partnership. PLEASE BRING A LAPTOP COMPUTER WITH THE PLATFORM OF YOUR CHOICE INSTALLED. This workshop is funded by the National Science Foundation under DUE IUSE grants 1524128, 1524493, 1524963, 1525062, and 1525525. This workshop is funded by an NSF grant. The participant will pay up front for the workshop during registration and receive a refund after the workshop is completed in the amount of $60. Each participant will be refunded $40.The total cost of the workshop to each participant is $20 for AAPT members and $45 for non-members of AAPT.

The Living Physics Portal an AAPT online project hosted on ComPADRE, is a dynamic community collection of instructional materials for teaching physics for the life sciences, with community input and support, serving a wide spectrum of users and developers of curricular materials and pedagogies. It is now ready to accept contributions for inclusion in three different levels with distinct submission criteria regarding the extent of preparation needed to make the materials useable for others, and type of review. There is a basic “sandbox” level that is appropriate for materials or ideas in development. There is another level that houses more finished materials, which have undergone a basic editorial review. A third level is for well-tested, mature materials that have been through a peer-review process, equivalent to a journal peer-review. Come with materials, drafts, or ideas and receive guidance as you go through the submission process at the appropriate level. Learn how easy it is to share ideas and materials and get community input. You will also have the chance to be a beta test user to see how materials can be accessed for you to use or modify for your own classes, and seek community support.Laptop required.

This workshop certifies you to request and handle materials from NASA's lunar materials and meteorite samples program for use in your classroom.

In this playful laboratory, we will experiment with applications of improvisational theater (improv) to enhance communication, collaboration, and creativity in physics education at all levels. As learners, teachers or scholars, we do our best work when our minds and bodies, thoughts and emotions are all working together like the sum of aligned vectors. In physics, we sometimes focus so much on people’s valuable mental and analytical skills (the cognitive domain), we can neglect other vital interconnected aspects of ourselves (such as our emotions, the affective domain, and our bodies, the psychomotor domain). Learning involves replacing fear of the unknown with enjoyable exploration. Using tools and techniques from improv, we will investigate strategies to connect people in uncovering solutions to problems, such as nonverbal body language, perceptions of status, team building, listening, stress reduction, overcoming inhibition, and fostering growth mindset. We can explore insights from positive psychology and martial arts rooted in Eastern philosophy, such as the concept of “flow” or “the zone”, that state when one is joyfully immersed in energized focus. All are welcome to join us and challenge assumptions in this camaraderie-filled workshop that is sure to deliver "aha" moments.

Deep conceptual understanding of work and energy builds upon defining systems. While we know what we mean when we say "potential energy of a ball," our students hear what we say; when to use work due to gravity or potential energy becomes a guessing game instead of being determined by what is in the system. That energy is always conserved, so constant in closed, isolated systems is another area where small inaccuracies in language can cause our students to misunderstand and misapply conservation laws. Work, defined as the transfer of energy to a system by a mechanical process, requires work be done by a force exerted by something external to the system. By carefully defining systems and categorizing work, potential and internal energy, we can provide our students with a logical framework that does not require memorization of special cases (or guessing). In this workshop we share materials supporting this approach to teaching about energy and work and discuss how a few changes in discourse can significantly improve students’ understanding of these important concepts, while preparing them to do better in future study. This approach aligns with the NSF-sponsored best practices study that informed the AP physics redesign.

Experience the discovery of neutrino physics by exploring data from Fermilab neutrino experiments. Learn about wrap around activities that you can use in the Middle/High School to get students exploring real data and how these activities fulfill NGSS requirements.

Deep learning is a specialized area of machine learning that is having myriad impacts on our lives. It is the technology on which advances in areas like self-driving vehicles, speech recognition, and computer vision are based. This workshop will be a project-based primer on deep learning using Python with Jupyter Notebook, Keras, and TensorFlow. The aim is to provide physics instructors with the skills and experience they need to introduce their students to deep learning. Topics covered will include the basics of supervised learning, artificial neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks. Participants will explore artificial intelligence applications such as the automated classification of images and the generation of human-readable text.

Join this fully reimbursible workshop to engage in integrated activities appropriate for high school and introductory college physics and astronomy teachers who want to teach with integration and authentic NASA data. Attendees will use resources developed and tested by physics education researchers through the NASA Space Science Education Consortium, including labs, lecture tutorials, clicker questions, and diagnostic assessments. These materials address topics that integrate Physics, Earth Science, and Space Science, including (1) coronal mass ejection videos to understand both simple mechanics as well as accelerations of relativistic particles, (2) sunspot data to understand period and frequency, (3) eclipses to understand geometric optics, and (4) auroral currents to understand electromagnetism. (This workshop is fully funded by a NASA Grant/Cooperative Agreement Number NNX16AR36A awarded to Temple University and the AAPT. Participants who complete the workshop may seek full reimbursement of their workshop registration fee.)

In this workshop we will demonstrate several examples of how computation can be integrated into upper-level physics courses in ways that will add value to the existing curriculum. The PICUP partnership has developed materials for a variety of physics courses in a variety of platforms including Python/VPython, C/C++, Fortran, MATLAB/Octave, Java, and Mathematica. Participants will receive information on the computational materials that have been developed, will discuss ways to tailor the materials to their own classes, and will learn about opportunities that are available to receive additional support through the PICUP partnership. PLEASE BRING A LAPTOP COMPUTER WITH THE PLATFORM OF YOUR CHOICE INSTALLED. This workshop is funded by the National Science Foundation under DUE IUSE grants 1524128, 1524493, 1524963, 1525062, and 1525525. The participant will pay up front for the workshop during registration and receive a refund after the workshop is completed in the amount of $40. The total cost of the workshop to each participant is $20 for AAPT members and $45 for non-members of AAPT.

"It's HOT in Here" Designing a structure to maximize or minimize the effects of solar energy is easy, right? Engineers must consider environment, constraints, structure, and materials when designing a building that will stay warm in the winter and/or cool in the summer. Participants in this workshop will collaboratively plan, design, test, and modify a "house" within certain constraints and with limited resources. Will your house win? Each participant will receive a wireless temperature probe so enrollment will be limited. NGSS: HS-PS3-3, MT-ETS1-2, 4-PS3-4.

Do you want your students to be more engaged with your physics course? Most high school and college faculty are aware of many ways to enhance engagement inside the classroom, but what happens when students leave the room? Students go to other classes, then eventually to their dorms or their apartments, or to their parents' homes. You may never know. One thing is for sure, though, almost all will check in on social media between classes AND at home. This workshop will explore several social media platforms that allow faculty to leverage students' desire and ability to stay connected to their classmates. The presenters have experience with Course Networking, Piazza, and Campuswire. We will describe our successes (and our failures) but we will not promote any particular platform. Participants will have ample opportunity to explore different platforms, and to decide how they can make the best use of social media to engage and educate students in their own setting.

Being aware of common student alternate conceptions in physics is beneficial when designing instruction to help students develop a coherent knowledge structure. It is thus not surprising that knowledge of common student difficulties is one aspect of what Sulman coined “pedagogical content knowledge”, or in other words, knowledge about how to teach a subject that is different from the content knowledge itself. This workshop will first explore the literature on the extent to which TAs (undergraduate and graduate students teaching labs and recitations) and instructors are aware of various introductory student alternate conceptions. Participants will identify common alternate conceptions of students in certain question and discuss potential uses in a professional development class. In addition, participants will discuss productive approaches to help both TAs and instructors learn about these alternate conceptions and integrate this knowledge into their pedagogical design.

Typically, when an instructor creates assessments their goal is to probe specific concepts, and the questions they design would likely be deemed by other experts to probe those concepts. However, after an assessment is given, the instructor may find that students responded in unexpected ways. Factor analysis enables instructors to determine if the intended concepts were answered consistently by students or not. Using a statistical process, factor analysis attempts to identify the number of independent concepts on a given assessment. In this workshop, the basic underpinnings of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) will be discussed. Then, attendees will use supplied data and the statistical computing language R to extract the number of concepts on a given assessment. By combining expert analysis of the questions and the EFA results, attendees will then build factor models for the assessment. These models will be verified through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with another data set to verify whether their EFA driven model is a product unique to the sample data or can be generalized to larger populations.

In this half-day workshop, attendees will learn how to use available remotely- and robotically- controlled telescopes that are set up for students to access in learning how to conduct fundamental research in astronomy. Designed for the relative novice in professional-grade astronomy research, this first-steps workshop will demonstrate how educators can help students conduct authentic research by studying binary star astrometry, exo-planet photometry, asteroid astrometry and photometry, and solar astronomy. The end goal of these research projects is for students and their mentoring teachers to formally publish the results of their work.

Over the past several decades, many physics curricula have been developed on the basis of physics education research. Some have been stand-alone (e.g., Physics and Everyday Thinking), while others are more supplemental (e.g., Tutorials in Introductory Physics). Relatively few have targeted the lab component of an otherwise traditional course. Recently, labs for mechanics and E&M have been developed and classroom tested at Western Washington University and Whatcom Community College. These labs, which draw on PET, TiIP, and the Minnesota Context Rich Problems for inspiration, use a three-part structure: guided experiments to promote conceptual understanding, a structured reflection, and an open-ended, quantitative challenge task. The labs focus on sense making rather than verification. They are scaffolded, and thus constitute an incremental step from traditional pedagogy. The labs can be used in conjunction with either a traditional or a “reformed” lecture, and can be taught by undergraduate or graduate TAs. The labs may be valuable for those considering implementation of student-centered instruction in just a single course component, especially perhaps in a course that does not have a recitation. In this workshop, participants will work through selected activities from the E&M labs and discuss implementation.

Flipping the Classroom and the emergence of free online video hosting has led many of us to be asked to make videos of our lessons and demos. In this workshop, you will learn the five methods of video engagement, fast and effective video writing techniques, and beginner/intermediate editing skill competency that will improve your video quality and help get your message across more effectively. Your instructor is master physics teacher and filmmaker James Lincoln who has made over 100 science videos. Tips and ideas for effective and engaging physics demos are also included.

This workshop introduces high school physics teachers and teacher educators to curricular resources for implementing NGSS practices in the physics classroom. In addition to understanding physics, scientific practices, and students, teachers of NGSS must also recognize their roles as curating transformative educational experiences among students. As students make claims from evidence and establish principles from consensus (often for the first time), they undergo a kind of transformation in their understanding of the role of science education in their lives. In this workshop, teachers learn to manage the multiple demands of supporting students through this transformation while providing meaningful laboratory experiences and consensus building opportunities. By analyzing video and interview transcripts, participants will discuss their roles as teachers in helping students integrate physics content and scientific practices as they develop models, explanations, and principles that explain the physical world.

Participants in this workshop will have hands-on experience with research-validated active learning activities for the introductory laboratory—including RealTime Physics (RTP) labs using computer-based tools and video analysis—that have been used effectively in university, college and high school physics courses. We will also experience Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs)—a strategy for making lectures more active learning environments. These active learning approaches are fun, engaging and validated by physics education research (PER). Research results demonstrating the effectiveness of RTP and ILDs will be presented. Emphasis will be on activities in electricity and magnetism and optics. The following will be distributed: Modules from the Third Edition of RTP, and the ILD book.

Houston's most important and highly attended tourist attraction is the Johnson Space Center (JSC) operated by NASA, and the partner non - profit museum Space Center Houston. NASA's Johnson Space Center has served as a hub of human spaceflight activity for more than half a century. It is home to the nation's Astronaut Corps, the International Space Station mission operations, the Orion Program, and a host of future space developments. This special group tour for AAPT participants and families will allow you to see JSC by riding in a tram moving as a group from attraction to attraction, be one of the first daily visitors to historic mission control, the astronaut training facility, and Rocket Park, including the iconic Saturn V rocket and possibly the Neutral Buoyancy Training Facility. After, walk through Space Center Houston at your leisure. "Intelligent fun" defines the way groups describe their experiences at Space Center Houston. A day when they've touched a moon rock, witnessed a shuttle launch, and seen real, space-flown vehicles … all this and much more. More is right, because the museum has over 400 exhibits, two I-Max movie theaters, and a great cafeteria for lunch (featuring burgers, chicken sandwiches, BBQ, and pizza. For a sample of the museum visit click here. Register now for this special opportunity! Tour runs from 8:00 hotel departure by bus, to the 1pm departure from JSC to return to the hotel at 2pm, Sunday January 13. Please be aware this NASA tour will not be affected by the federal government shutdown and will continue as planned.