Equipment for a Full-Year Course in Discovering Physics for Pre-college Teachers

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Equipment is being utilized for the development of a two- semester introductory level laboratory course entitled "Discovering Physics." The course emphasizes an understanding of the basic concepts that naturally lead us to ask "How do we know...?" and "Why do we believe...?" questions about physical phenomena. The story lines of "What is light?" and "What is randomness?" are utilized for their general interest, their accessibility, and their importance in physics. The course is oriented toward students planning to become elementary school teachers, adopts the same teaching philosophy that should be used in the elementary school classroom, and has a fifty percent enrollment of female students. The laboratory emphasizes a cooperative learning environment and encourages students to develop hypotheses and to propose and perform experiments that generate real data and experiences. Funds are being utilized to purchase and construct more sophisticated equipment that will yield quantitative results, reduce one layer of student confusion, and allow further experiments related to electro-magnetic radiation, nonlinear phenomena, and chaos. Since there are no available textbooks for a course of this type, project staff are producing a university-level modular-based Discovery Workbook. The proposed project is strengthening the laboratory based course at Clark University and having national impact.NSF grant funds are being matched with funds from non-federal sources.