Spring 2024 SCAAPT Meeting


1	SCAAPT Spring Meeting
2	Saturday, March 23, 2024
3	Loyola Marymount University, Seaver Hall, Room 100
4	Parking is available in Parking Lot A and is free during weekends. Parking Lot A is right next to the entrance on 80th Street.
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6	Order of Magnitude contest question: How many carbon atoms are in the atmosphere?
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9	Tentative Schedule
12	9:00	Modernizing Traditional Labs with Simulation Technology
13			Workshop by Anatomage
14			Explore the transformative potential of using the Science Table by Anatomage in physics education. This session will explore how these science simulations can replace or supplement traditional lab experiences, providing students with new visual aids and pathways to learn science concepts. Participants will engage with the Coulomb's Law and Double Slit experiments, showcasing the enhanced understanding that comes from integrating modern technology into the classroom.
15	10:00	Welcome
16	10:00	Telling Stories of Physics in the Real World with Tracker
17			Brian Foley, CSUN
18			The Tracker Video Analysis tool has been a valuable but underused resource for the last 15 years. Tracker (and Vernier’s Video Analysis tool) helps analyze any video that has motion in it by identifying the object’s x and y coords and plotting the results. This simple idea means we are no longer limited to projectile motion of cartoon cannons. We can now do our analysis of BMX racers, Ohtani fastballs, or squirrels jumping. To get started we will explore how to use the tracker tools and look at some examples of analysis that inspires.
19	10:15	A Radiant Heating Experiment & Earth's Surface Temperature
20			Eric Schiff, Syracuse University
21			We describe a moderate-cost radiant heat transfer experiment we’ve used in the student laboratory of elementary physics classes. The main innovation is an aluminized mylar flap that cuts off infrared heating by an electric heating panel, and thereby increases the panel’s temperature. Energy balance diagrams that describe this experiment introduce the diagrams used to connect infrared properties of the atmosphere to the surface temperature of the earth. A quantitative extension of the experiment is consistent with the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.
22	10:30	Baja California chapter of AAPT: What PER looks like in Baja
23			Fermin Franco Medrano, Universidad Autonoma de Baja California
24			How do students just across the border learn physics similarly and differently compared to here? Dr. Medrano will take us through his university (UABC) as well as the Baja California chapter of AAPT so we can see what it’s like in Baja. Opportunities for collaboration individually or institutionally welcome.
25	11:30	Eclipse
26			Bryn Bishop, Art of Problem Solving
27			Everyone in the continental US will see at least a partial solar eclipse on April 8 - are you ready? I’ll share some resources and simple activities to try with your students.
28	11:45	SCAAPT Business Meeting, followed by Lunch
29	1:20	Show & Tell
30	1:50	Spreading and Sharing Energy
31			Chad Kishimoto, University of San Diego
32			Clausius coined the term entropy from the Greek term for transformation, τροπή. Since then, descriptors such as disorder, missing information, and multiplicity have emerged as analogies for his invented term. Perhaps Nobel laureate Leon Cooper put it best, that by using an "ancient language" as his basis, Clausius coined a term that meant the same thing to everyone: nothing. Harvey Leff introduced the notion of entropy as the spreading and sharing of energy. I will briefly outline his descriptions of the spreading and sharing of energy on the path toward equilibrium.
33	2:00	Objectively Measuring Teacher (and Student) Performance
34			Vince Coletta, Loyola Marymount University
35			Student Evaluations have a myriad of issues for measuring how much your students learned in the class. Standardized gains talks (FCI et al) do a lot better but adding a reasoning test like Lawson helps control biases found in the gains test.
36	2:30	AP Physics Changes for Next Year
37			James Lincoln, Director of NPTW
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39	2:45	Successful Problem Solving Patterns in Undergraduate Physics Classes
40			Andrew Rivas, Azusa Pacific University
41			We investigated the problem solving patterns of students solving a physics problem. Students were observed solving a problem in pencast videos, and their problem-solving actions were categorized with a rubric. Six categories of problem solving are included in the rubric. Their problem-solving patterns were analyzed, and we identified practices that correspond to successful problem solving. Creating a plan sooner rather than later and spending more time on analyzing problems led to successful problem solving.
42	3:00	Oblique billiard-ball collisions for introductory physics
43			Alan DeWeerd, University of Redlands
44			An oblique (not head-on) collision between two billiard balls is an interesting example for an intermediate-level course on classical mechanics. At first glance, such a collision seems simple, but there are some subtleties. I will explore what can be covered in an introductory course without too much mathematics, emphasizing collisions between frozen billiard balls where the results are relatively simple.
45	3:15	a > g
46			Larry Stein, University of La Verne
47			We don't usually think of accelerations greater than that of gravity. I present some examples and some demos that illustrate an acceleration that is greater than g.
48	3:30	"The Intrepid: Dawn Of The Interstellar Age." Not just sci-fi, STEM-fi.
49			Arnie Benn, The Quantum Bicycle Society
50			A brief description of this award-winning, real-science, hard sci-fi story, along with examples of specific related STEM curriculum opportunities.
51	3:45	Dark Matter Entropy
52			Noah Bray-Ali, Mount Saint Mary's University
53			"To see a World in a Grain of Sand..." Sand is made of quartz, the most common mineral in the crust of the Earth and the most commonly synthesized polar material in the world. On December 8, 2010, the Gemological Institute of America sent a gem-quality synthetic quartz to the RRUFF project at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Wildcat undergrads working on the project measured the Raman light scattering spectrum of the "Grain of Sand." And what they saw tells us the entropy of dark matter in the Universe.
54	4:00	Closing, Raffles, and Order of Magnitude
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