The 2018 Spring Meeting of the AAPT New England Section will be held on March 16 & 17 at Nashua Community College, Amherst Street, Nashua, NH.
The theme of the meeting is: Increasing Diversity in Physics
Our Keynote speaker is: Dr. Beth Cunningham, Executive Officer of AAPT.
Working Schedule:
Friday, March 16, 2018
4:00 pm Registration
5:00 pm Poster Session & Vendors
6:30 pm Buffet Dinner
7:30 pm Keynote Speaker
Saturday,
March 17, 2018
7:30 am Continental Breakfast & Late Registration, Posters & Vendors
8:45 am Contributed Talks**
10:15 am Coffee Break
10:30 am Panel Session & Discussion
12:30 pm Buffet Lunch. Posters & Vendors
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm Workshops (1.5 hour and/or 3 hour sessions)
4:30 pm - 5:00 pm Pick up professional development certificates.
Workshops Run Concurrently:
Choose Track A or either or both of the Track B offerings.
Track A
A: 1:30 - 4:30 pm PTRA TIPERs Workshop by Steve Henning of PTRA —
PTRA TIPERS (Tasks Inspired by Physics Education Research) are tasks inspired by Physics Education Research to provide alternative learning formats. TIPERS provide students with tasks that address physical ideas and principles in a variety of ways. Some of these are Ranking Tasks, Bar Chart Tasks, Linked Multiple Choice Tasks, Working Backwards Tasks, Predict and Explain Tasks and many others. These are designed to help students learn the important concepts and principles of physics while providing a conceptual base upon which students can solve physics problems with understanding. Participants will be receiving the latest TIPERS Manual. (The Ranking Tasks manual is no longer in print.)
Track B
B1: 1:30 - 3:00 pm Integrating Computation into STEM Courses by Jay Wang, UMass Dartmouth — Integration of computation into STEM education is increasingly being recognized nationally as an important component to increasing students’ computational thinking skills. In this workshop, a learning-by-doing framework will be described that integrates computation into the physics classes at every level from introductory physics classes to graduate courses. It enables students to actively do, rather than just think, physics.
This workshop aims for practical and hands-on activities. Actual activities using Jupyter Python/VPython will be used. Interested Participants are encouraged to bring their laptop, ideally with Jupyter Python installed. This can be done with an all-in-one installer such as Anaconda Python
See http://www.faculty.umassd.edu/j.wang/ for more information.
B2: 3:00 - 4:30 Getting Started in Physics Education Research by Andria Schwortz, Quinsigamond CC. — Do you have burning questions about how your students are learning? Why can they answer a question if phrased one way but not another? What can you do to improve your teaching? Skeptical of new teaching styles and want to test if they’re effective in your classroom? This workshop will give you some basics on how to perform education research, including styles of research, when and how to get approval from an Institutional Review Board, what to do with your results, and publishing. Group time will include discussing your own questions and how you can investigate them.
** The call for contributed papers/posters is at aapt-nes.org. We are encouraging contributions in these 3 tracks:
- Increasing diversity in Physics
- General Physics pedagogy contributions: ideas related to effective high school and post-secondary physics teaching
- Assessment: how & what do we measure so that we know our teaching is effective.
There is a block of 24 rooms reserved for Friday night for $99.00 at the Hampton Inn Nashua, 407 Amherst St, Nashua, NH 03063. Reservations: (603) 883-5333.
Attendees will have to call the Nashua Hampton Inn directly and ask for the Nashua Community College rate. Register by February 16 for the discounted price.