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

设备被用于两个学期的入门级实验课程“发现物理”的开发。本课程强调对基本概念的理解，这些概念自然会引导我们问“我们如何知道……？”和“我们为什么相信……？”关于物理现象的问题。“什么是光？”和“什么是随机性？”的故事情节被用于它们的普遍兴趣、可访问性和它们在物理学中的重要性。这门课程的目标是准备成为小学教师的学生，采用与小学课堂相同的教学理念，女生占50%。实验室强调合作学习的环境，鼓励学生提出假设，提出并进行实验，从而产生真实的数据和经验。资金正在用于购买和建造更复杂的设备，这些设备将产生定量的结果，减少学生的困惑，并允许进一步进行与电磁辐射、非线性现象和混沌有关的实验。由于这种类型的课程没有可用的教科书，项目工作人员正在制作一个基于模块的大学水平的发现工作手册。拟议的项目正在加强克拉克大学的实验室基础课程，并具有全国性的影响。美国国家科学基金会的拨款正与来自非联邦来源的资金相匹配。

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.