Introduction

[Bruce Sherwood]

As a new member of this list, I was invited to introduce myself.

My connection to Friam is that after Peter Lissaman told me about it,
my wife Ruth Chabay and I realized that attending the Friday morning
coffee-house discussions at St. Johns was just what we geeks needed --
the company of other geeks. Last Friday was our first visit, and we
had a marvelous time.

Ruth and I are physicists, working in the somewhat unusual physics
subdiscipline called PER -- Physics Education Research. People in this
subdiscipline are physicists in university physics departments whose
professional research is in undergraduate education. Physics was the
first academic discipline to have such a thing, and other disciplines
have started to create such structures as well. All faculty who teach
of course do some scholarly work on teaching and learning in the
undergraduate curriculum, but PER faculty make it their career focus,
and they need to acquire knowledge in a variety of subjects, not just
physics. Note too that PER is not something that can be carried out in
colleges of education, which focus on precollege education. Moreover,
to make major contributions to the teaching and learning of
undergraduate physics requires very deep domain knowledge, not just
deep pedagogical knowledge.

Most PER is devoted to pedagogical questions, on how to improve
teaching and learning in the intro physics course, since that's the
course that has the biggest number of students by far (very few
students major in physics). Most PER takes as given the content of the
intro course, which has not changed for a hundred years and which
stops around 1860. Some decades ago, when engineering and science
students were required to take three semesters of intro physics, the
third semester had contained some 20th century ideas, but many years
ago most disciplines changed to requiring only two semesters of intro
physics, both of which are pre-1860, with the effect that unless you
major in physics, you won't hear the word "atom" from the lips of a
physics professor. It is as though Bio 101 didn't mention DNA.

Ruth and I have focused on the content, on what should be taught in
the 21st century, and over the last 20 years we developed a curriculum
and a textbook that admits that the 20th century happened and that
matter is made of atoms. It isn't just a matter of discussing
phenomena first observed in the 20th century but, more profoundly,
taking a 20th-century perspective even on pre-20th-century physics.
Two examples: 1) 20th-century physics made huge strides in unifying
seemingly disparate phenomena and emphasizing the power of a small
number of fundamental principles (but in the traditional intro physics
course students see physics as a large number of special-case
formulas). 2) Computational modeling is now co-equal with theory and
experiment (but the intro physics course has never included
computational modeling; indeed, you can even major in physics in many
good physics departments and never do any computational modeling in
your entire undergraduate career).

You can learn more about our Matter & Interactions curriculum at
matterandinteractions.org.

We include a serious introduction to computational modeling, in which
students write small programs to model physical systems (no black
boxes). Because students today know every way to use computers except
for programming, we need a programming environment that is
exceptionally easy to learn and use, and we use VPython (vpython.org),
an open-source tool based on the Python programming language. VPython
was invented in 2000 by David Scherer, a student of ours at Carnegie
Mellon. I'm currently the main developer and gatekeeper for this open
source project. VPython creates real-time navigable 3D animations as a
side effect (!) of computations. A specific connection to the concerns
of Friam is that we have intro physics students compute three-body
orbits and experience emergent behavior and high sensitivity to
initial conditions.

From 2002-2010 we taught at North Carolina State University. We've
lived part-time in Santa Fe for five years, and a year ago we moved
here permanently.

Bruce Sherwood

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