Courses I’ve taught

Michigan State University

  • Physics I (In the Lyman Briggs College)
  • Physics II (In the Lyman Briggs College)
  • Physics for Teachers (An intensive 2 week course for in-service teachers)

Texas State University

  • Calculus-based Physics I
  • Calculus-based Physics II
  • Algebra-based Physics I
  • Conceptual Physics I

East Carolina University

  • General Physics I Laboratory - Authored new laboratory curriculum
  • General Physics II Laboratory - Co-authored new laboratory curriculum
  • Calculus-based Physics I
  • Calculus-based Physics II
  • Methods of Teaching College Physics (ECU’s version of the LA pedagogy course)
  • Electricity and Magnetism I (using Griffiths’ text)

What do I want my students to learn?

Scientific truth is discovered through the practice of doing science. Professional physicists discover new physics as they engage in scientific practice: creating models, designing experiments to test these models, analyzing and interpreting data, communicating results, and using evidence-based reasoning to defend their conclusions. Research has shown that students learn physics best when they engage in the same processes as professional physicists. In my classroom, students work together to engage in the scientific enterprise.

Computers are an important part of the scientific enterprise in general, and physics in particular. It isn’t simply a few people saying this, the following is an exerpt of a statement from the American Association of Physics Teachers:

Contemporary research in physics and related sciences almost always involves the use of computers. They are used for data collection and analysis, numerical analysis, simulations, and symbolic manipulation. Computational physics has become a third way of doing physics and complements traditional modes of theoretical and experimental physics. In addition, almost all undergraduate students who take physics courses will use computational tools in their future careers even if they do not become practicing physicists…The computer provides a new tool that enhances both theory and experiment.

Given the importance of computers in the scientific enterprise, and their uses in industry and other fields, data analysis using computational tools is a critical part of the physics curriculum at all levels. In my own research laboratory, students use the Statistical Programming Language R and Jupyter Notebooks as a tool to investigate questions of importance to the Physics Education Research community. I’m also a member of PICUP, the Partnership for the Integration of Computation in Undergraduate Physics.