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| Physics in a Suitcase |
Project Summary
This project will assemble a set of innovative, highly-portable Physics lecture-demonstration kits, containing both hands-on equipment plus computer simulations. The lecture demonstrations selected for our portable kits will be "user friendly", emphasising examples drawn from students' everyday experience together with examples chosen from the workplace environment. The computer simulations will include video images and film clips on CDROM. As well, some versions of traditional lecture demonstrations, together with examples of practical applications used in industry and research, will be included on CDROM film clips. ASSESS, a widely used Computer Managed Learning program developed within the School of Biophysical Sciences and Electrical Engineering at Swinburne University, will be used to help evaluate the effectiveness of these kits in aiding student learning.
Physics lecture demonstrations provide a kinetic, visual perspective to traditional "chalk and talk" lectures. This added perspective enhances interaction and comprehension for a large proportion of students who tend to use many different learning modes. We intend that our kits will highlight Physics in the context of the "real world" as perceived by our students, many of whom are drawn from backgrounds where highly technical or abstract formal learning patterns have not been encouraged or valued. Our experience suggests that a significant number of female students (such as those studying our Medical Biophysics and Instrumentation course) would particularly appreciate lecture demonstrations which use simple, appropriate technology and make the connections between the Physics that is taught and "real world" situations, rather than overtly technological, laboratory-based examples.
Presenting undergraduate Physics lecture courses to students majoring in many diverse disciplines in Science and Engineering is a major activity of our School. Although exposure to practical lecture demonstrations is widely considered by Physics educators to be a particularly effective part of the learning process in undergraduate Physics, due to several practical limitations lecture demonstrations are seldom used at Swinburne (and perhaps many of the other newer universities). These limitations involve access problems prohibiting the transport of trolleys of equipment to lecture theatres, the lack of sufficient technical support to build or maintain traditional demonstration equipment, and in some cases the lack of relevance of traditional demonstrations to many of our more applied Physics and Engineering courses.
The "Physics in a Suitcase" kits will also be made available to members of our department when conducting "outreach" activities with school students. Summaries of the design and use of all kits will be freely available over the Internet so that the kits can be duplicated by other universities and schools. The ASian Physics Education Network (ASPEN) has expressed an interest in low cost, portable lecture demonstration kits. We shall discuss with ASPEN the possibility of its financial support for Asian Physics Departments who wish to duplicate some or all of these kits for their own use.
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 | ......... |  Peter Greenaway | ......... |  |