Sustainable Agriculture

The Sustainable Agriculture team is addressing malnutrition through aquaponics. Aquaponics is a soil-free farming method that reduces growing periods and water consumption by 90% compared to traditional methods. The Sustainable Agriculture team works alongside its clients, Youth with a Mission and Trans World Radio, to develop and implement universal and scalable aquaponics prototypes. This year, the team designed and constructed nine working prototypes for a sensitivity analysis. The team also constructed two unique airlift pumps to create alternatives for their clients. They also produced a digital system monitor for tracking temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen in the aquaponics prototypes for our clients at Youth with a Mission. Funding for this work provided by The Collaboratory for Strategic Partnerships and Applied Research.https://mosaic.messiah.edu/engr2022/1019/thumbnail.jp

Design and non-design labs: Does transfer occur

Abstract. This paper is the second in the series of three describing a controlled study "Transfer of scientific abilities". The study was conducted in a large-enrollment introductory physics course taught via Investigative Science Learning Environment. Its goal was to fmd whether designing their own experiments in labs affects students' approaches to experimental problem solving in new areas of physics and in biology, and their learning of physics concepts. This paper reports on the part of the study that assesses student work while solving an experimental problem in a physics content area not studied in class. For a quantitative evaluation of students' abilities, we used scientific abilities rubrics. We studied the students' lab reports and answers to non-traditional exam problems related to the lab. We evaluated their performance and compared it with the performance of a control group that had the same course but enrolled in nondesign labs instead of design labs. The project was supported by NSF grant DRL 0241078

Pre-Service Physics Teachers and Physics Education Research.

Training pre-service teachers requires, among other things, content knowledge, pedagogical skills and pedagogical content knowledge. Teacher preparation programs have little, if any spare time to add more courses/activities to their program. However, I argue in this paper that we, as educators, must enhance the amount of physics education research in our pre-service physics teacher training programs. In this study, I analyze the results of two different types of exposure to physics education research (PER) from two different groups of pre-service physics teachers in our masters of arts and teaching program. The preliminary results show, for example that the PER helped the pre-service teachers increase their understanding of student thought processes while they solved problems. Physics teachers must have this type of ability to be successful in the classroom

Physics Champions Among White Women and People of Color.

If a person were to observe my classroom when I taught high school physics, he or she would find the traditional labs with the lectures, notes, and problems to solve that enhanced understanding. As I became more skilled in my profession, I promoted inquiry and critical thinking skills. However, the necessity was never obvious to me, nor was I ever taught how, to address social inequity in physics (let alone did I fully understand it myself). Why was that? My job was to teach concepts such as momentum, forces, inertia, circuits, etc. This list goes on and on. It wasn’t until years later in my career that I began to understand the importance of bringing social inequities in physics to the front of the classroom. It started to become obvious I needed to do something at least in my own classroom when I had difficulties highlighting anyone in physics who was not White and not male. Though this was never my intent while teaching, I believe I helped maintain this social inequity, and perpetuate the idea that physics is for White males (and yes, I am a White male teacher). This article provides arguments and resources for teaching explicitly about equity issues in introductory physics

We are Watching You

https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/bfa_exhibits_2017_fall/1049/thumbnail.jp

Using Eye-Trackers to Study Student Attention in Physical Science Classes.

Physics education researchers have had a strong impact on how professors teach physics and physical science courses. Faculty can find an instructional strategy to match their personal philosophies, yet how do students pay attention in those classes? There is the old belief that you have your students’ attention for the first 15 minutes of class but after that their attention declines. Researchers have studied student attention in the past but have not used an eye-tracker to truly capture what students look at during class. This study is the first to introduce eye-trackers to investigate student attention in a lecture or more accurately a large group instruction environment. I conducted this study in the fall and the spring semester of a physical science course. One student in each class wore an eye-tracker. I found that the first 15 minute adage is not necessarily true. Over the course of an entire class students have the ability to stay on-task fairly consistently

Gaze scribing in physics problem solving.

Eye-tracking has been widely used for research purposes in fields such as linguistics and marketing. However, there are many possibilities of how eye-trackers could be used in other disciplines like physics. A part of physics education research deals with the differences between novices and experts, specifically how each group solves problems. Though there has been a great deal of research about these differences there has been no research that focuses on noticing exactly where experts and novices look while solving the problems. Thus, to complement the past research, I have created a new technique called gaze scribing. Subjects wear a head mounted eye-tracker while solving electrical circuit problems on a graphics monitor. I monitor both scan patterns of the subjects and combine that with videotapes of their work while solving the problems. This new technique has yielded new information and elaborated on previous studies