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

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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.

More like this

Um, insert link to vector notation post?
I like the M&I vector notation way better than ijk-hat notation. Where do i-hat, j-hat, and k-hat come from anyway?

@Fran,

This is what happens when you write a post while off line and then finish it two weeks later. Sorry about that - but I fixed it now.

Although the Matter & Interactions curriculum (of which I'm a co-author; thanks, Rhett!) uses < x, y, z > notation almost exclusively for a host of good reasons, with only occasional mention of i/j/k, it might be useful to mention an advantage of i/j/k that was pointed out to us by Corinne Manogue (leader of the important Paradigms reform of upper-level physics at Oregon state) and her mathematics husband Tevian Dray, an advantage that is more relevant in later courses than in the intro course. If you write 3i+4j-2k, or more interestingly 3rhat+4thetahat-2phihat, you can take time derivatives in a straight-forward way that include the possibility of time derivatives of the unit vectors themselves. For example, d(thetahat)/dt is perpendicular to the thetahat unit vector, and this kind of thing can be very useful in upper-level physics courses. There's no easy or obvious way to do this in an < r, theta, phi > kind of representation because there are no obvious unit vectors to be differentiated. However, after some discussion, Manogue and Dray came to see why at the intro level (which is not their field of interest) there are strong reasons for using < x, y, z >.

I should also say that something which is either a bug or a feature of Matter & Interactions is that there is almost no discussion of choosing appropriate coordinate axes based on key directions in the problem; we just stick almost all the time with x to the right, y up (that is, radially away from the center of the Earth), and z out. We decided that in the intro course it was better to do a good job in one standard coordinate frame than face the risk of doing a mediocre job due to the overload of spending time teaching how to decide on a coordinate frame.

Dang. I should have previewed rather than posting. I forgot that in this blog things get lost if enclosed in html brackets. The form "less than" x, y, z "greater than" is missing from the first sentence after the word "notation" and after "do this in an" later in the first paragraph.

Having used Matter and Interactions (as a second year, college-level high school course), I agree wholeheartedly with your recommendation. When I left industry to start teaching, I was handed Arnold Arons' book by John Burk, a stupendously energetic, creative and excellent high school teacher. A couple of weeks later, he handed me Matter and Interactions and said "I'd be interested in your opinion of this approach to teaching friction." At one time I spent several years as a "tribologist," so I was overjoyed at what I perceived as the only coherent and correct treatment of friction I had ever seen at the freshman level. Then John told me that if I liked that, I really should read the chapter on electric circuits. I was totally hooked. This book is great for many other pedagogical reasons, too. For instance, holding off on Gauss's Law is the smartest thing a teacher can do in an E&M course, in my opinion. My former students routinely call to tell me that the foundation and habits of mind they built using Matter and Interactions was the springboard to their engineering/physics/scientific career.

By Mark Hammond (not verified) on 14 Apr 2010 #permalink

Thinks = Thinking