My two favorite curricula

Today is show and tell. I would like to show and tell you about two of my favorite textbooks for physics. Yes, I know. I have talked about these before, but you can't stop me. Both of these are alpha-super-awesome.

Matter and Interactions

This is a Calculus-based introductory physics textbook (from Wiley). The intended audience are engineers and scientists - in particular physics majors and chemistry majors. Computer science majors would do well to use this book also. So, why do I like this? Here are some of my favorite features.

• "Modern" and fundamental approach. If you look at most intro textbooks, they are essentially all the same in terms of order of topics. You know, kinematics, newton's second law etc... Matter and Interactions is different. It starts from more fundamental things. What is matter made of? How do we model this in terms of basic particles? I like this.
• Consistent use of vectors. From the beginning M and I uses vectors. Real, 3-d vectors with consistent notation. Other books are consistent in their use, but it seems that they like angle and magnitude as the preferred format. Maybe this is ok, but you end up doing a lot of things that may be unnecessarily confusing. M and I sticks with the component notation of vectors. This is really helpful when it comes to numerical calculations.
• Numerical Calculations. Science is all about doing things numerically - just look at the three body problem. Without numerical solutions, where would we be? M and I doesn't force numerical calculations on the students, but it is there. I like it.
• Circuits. Why is there constant current in a normal series circuit? M and I does a great job on this topic, approaching from a fundamental view. I have never seen a textbook do it like this before. It changed the way I think about circuits.

Check it out if you have a chance. Also, I like the WebAssign problems that go with the text (and I think the students like them also). There is also a great set of "clicker" questions for use in class.

Physics and Everyday Thinks (PET)

This is a non-math (not even algebra-based) physics course for students that are going to be elementary education teachers. The course was developed by Fred Goldberg, Steve Robinson, and Valerie Otero. We (Southeastern Louisiana University) started offering this course sort of by accident. Our college of Education was going through an NCATE review for accreditation. One of the things they needed was a science course that was hands-on and used inquiry. From the college of Ed, that was really all they wanted. It just so happened that there was already a 5 contact hour course for education majors in the catalog - it just had not been offered in a long time. So this course was resurrected.

Since I am a "Physics-Education" guy, I was given the task of teaching this course. The first semester, we used Physics by Inquiry. This is a great curriculum, however - the implementation had some problems:

• First - math. Physics by Inquiry has some math. Not crazy-hard math, but good thought-provoking math. It does not depend on math, but instead helps students develop ideas of proportional reasoning through some simple experiments. That may sound great, but when you add science and math for education majors, it is like adding sodium to water - BOOM. Many of them just shut down because it was math - they gave up. There were some that succeed, but not all.
• Open. Physics by Inquiry is very open. It will say - try this, what happens? These students just weren't at the level that they could take control of the inquiry. Physics by Inquiry was more like real inquiry, but it was a little too real.

PET solves these problems. First, since there is no math, students don't have an allergic math-reaction. The activities are more structured. These students do better with some structure. Here is the outline for a typical activity in the class:

• Students think about a question that brings out their initial ideas about some topic
• The class then has a discussion about this question to share their ideas.
• Next, the students perform particular experiments. Sometimes, these will involve simulators - but they are used as though they were real life data.
• During these experiments, students are working in groups and sharing ideas.
• At the end of the activity, there are some summarizing questions. The students have a class discussion to share and discuss their answers.

Here are some of my favorite aspects of the course.

• The data should be more important than what the authority (me or the text) says. Some students have trouble with this, but that is kind of a good thing.
• There are elements on the nature of science. At first this is just done in the structure of the curriculum. After students have had more experience, we have an explicit discussion of these ideas as a class.
• Elements of the nature of learning. How important is this? I think very - for all learners, but especially for future teachers.
• Examination of student (children's) ideas about content. In the curriculum, the students look at videos of children working on topics similar to those covered in class. This helps the future teachers understand children, the nature of learning AND the particular content.

If you are teaching a class for elementary education majors, you should probably be using either Physics by Inquiry or PET. I am not sure if there are any more planned, but the PET people often have workshops on the curriculum at the national AAPT meetings.