CK-12 21st Century Physics: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies Read online

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  Chapter 1: VA Introduction

  Background and Overview of Goals

  Welcome to Virginia's 21st Century Physics FlexBook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies, a result of Virginia’s FlexBook Pilot Project.

  This project was motivated by the confluence of two independent desires and capabilities:

  The recommendations of a 2007 Standards of Learning (SOL) review panel of practicing scientists and engineers that VA SOL should include contemporary and emerging science content as well as laboratory activities that incorporate industry state-of-the-practice equipment; and that Virginia should support an open-source software platform, such as a Wiki, for the timely publication of teacher-developed curriculum.

  The mission of the CK-12 Foundation to provide a collaborative online authoring environment that enables the production of free and open content aligned to curriculum standards and customizable for each student.

  This particular pilot FlexBook aims at several outcomes:

  Supplementing currently used Virginia physics textbooks by making valuable contemporary and emerging physics ideas available to all teachers at a single URL.

  Making laboratory activities that employ industry state-of-the-practice equipment available to all teachers.

  Providing a path for continuous improvement from teachers themselves through comments and new ideas after using a chapter with their physics classes.

  This pilot FlexBook project seeks many other outcomes:

  Can working teachers provide useful contemporary, emerging, and laboratory curriculum content in addition to their normal teaching duties?

  What intellectual property (IP) issues may be barriers to or facilitators of open-source content?

  Is the CK-12 FlexBook a good open-content platform for Virginia’s purposes?

  What additional features would make the CK-12 FlexBook even more useful to Virginia?

  What quality assurance process is required to make appropriate content available to all teachers and students?

  Is a book of many chapters by many authors in many voices readable and comprehensible by most students?

  Does this FlexBook provide valuable contemporary and emerging physics content that supplements current physics SOL?

  Is the content readily available to ALL of Virginia’s physics teachers at a single Web-based source?

  Can we provide timely and valuable feedback to CK-12 that will help them continually improve their FlexBook system for teachers’ use?

  Can we provide suggestions from Virginia’s teachers and students to CK-12 regarding Web 2.0 needs?

  Can we supply Virginia’s education policy-makers with concrete examples of the 2007 physics panel’s recommendations to help inform their 2010 review of Virginia physics SOL?

  Does this project give us a sense of the qualitative value of e-formats replacing some textbook purchases?

  Can we determine whether to extend this type of project to the instruction side of the DOE and to other disciplines?

  Pilot FlexBook Outcomes Expanded

  Making contemporary and emerging physics ideas available to all teachers in Virginia

  The 2007 SOL review panel was composed of practicing scientists and engineers drawn from universities, government laboratories, and the technology industry across the Commonwealth of Virginia. They found that current Virginia chemistry and physics SOL are more representative of the mid-th century than the beginning of the st century. For example, in the area of nuclear physics, essential knowledge and understanding is limited to protons and neutrons without mention of quarks and gluons. There is no mention of LED, LCD, or plasmas, but cathode ray tubes are explicitly recognized. Organic chemistry is left out of Virginia’s high school chemistry SOL and nanoscience or nanotechnology receives not a mention. The panel recommended that a number of existing content areas be excised and contemporary and emerging content be added.

  The panel saw evidence of the K-12 world being isolated from the contemporary world of work and research and was made anecdotally aware of teachers with less than minimal qualifications in coursework background. The resulting conclusion was that a reliable, timely, and easily available content source must be provided for all teachers. Because of delays involved with getting new material identified, published, and approved through traditional textbooks, the panels recommended that the Department of Education support an open-collaborative software “Wiki.” The Wiki would be open to all physics and chemistry teachers to post curriculum they developed and taught. It would focus particularly on contemporary and emerging content. After teaching a lesson, the teacher could add notes or suggestions on the Wiki, thus continuously improving its content. This would also enable a virtual learning community of K-12 teachers from throughout the Commonwealth.

  Making laboratory activities that employ industry state-of-the-practice equipment available to all teachers

  The scientists and engineers on the SOL review panels recognized that hands-on experiments and laboratories are the glue that connects science theory to real-world phenomena. They recommended that at least percent of a course be devoted to laboratories or demonstrations and that students use the same state-of-the-practice equipment that they would soon find in the technology workplace and college.

  The FlexBook laboratory chapters are addressed to three audiences:

  Teachers who have little or no experience with labs

  Teachers who teach labs but may be using obsolete equipment and technology

  Teachers who would like to use the FlexBook labs as a jumping-off point in developing their own labs

  For the first group of teachers, some of whom have limited experience and proficiency in lab science in general or physics labs in particular, the FlexBook write-ups should provide equipment lists and cookbook instruction. This will at least provide for some hands-on work with state-of-the-practice technology.

  The second group of teachers will be introduced to new equipment manufacturers and taught how to incorporate state-of-the-practice technology into engaging physics laboratories.

  The third group of teachers may find some of the equipment and its capabilities to be new and can use this information to develop their own labs with more advanced technology.

  Quality Control

  Version 0.9: All chapters in Release underwent three levels of review:

  A technical review by a university research physicist

  Peer review by three other authors

  Review by several students including three 10th grade high school students and a college freshman (non-science major)

  Version 1.0: All chapters in Release underwent one additional level of review via the public feedback we received from our open mailing list.

  All content is configuration controlled. While it can be copied and edited by users on the CK-12 FlexBook Platform http://flexbooks.ck12.org/flexr/book/vaflexbook the original FlexBook content cannot be changed by readers. The chapters will be updated from time to time based on the authors’ experiences and comments from readers an
d users. These updates will be noted by their release numbers.

  The Future

  st Century Physics FlexBook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies provides a starting point for continuous improvement from teachers themselves through comments and new ideas following use of a chapter with their physics classes.

  We live in a very dynamic world of discovery, technology development, and ideation in physics. Hardcopy books cannot engage in conversations regarding today’s or even recent physics developments. The Web, however, does provide a medium for such conversations. The FlexBook proposes several approaches to teaching labs and st century content. The chapters are configuration controlled in that users cannot edit them. However, we look to the day when users of chapters can comment directly in the FlexBook on what they saw as strengths and weaknesses of the chapter, how they changed the chapter to better suit their needs, and make recommendations on improving the chapter. This could lead to stranded conversations with the author and with other users, and contribute to an even better chapter in the next FlexBook release.

  Organization of this FlexBook

  There are chapters in Release . The first eight deal with contemporary topics of theory and applications including gravitation, nuclear and particle physics, nanoscience, and st century technologies used for medical imaging and visual display. The final three chapters focus on laboratory work employing state-of-the-practice equipment and the rapidly developing field of modeling and simulation.

  The reader will find that, unlike traditional textbooks of the last century, the chapters of this book read more like a collection of diverse essays, as all are written by different authors, and each reflect an individual’s unique voice. This style has become the norm in a world where students increasingly access data from the World Wide Web and pull together the pieces that they feel tell them a proper story. We offer this book as a starting point for a proper 21st century story of physics and hope that today’s students find it useful.

  FlexBook Chapter Synopses

  Chapter 1: Toward Understanding Gravitation by Andrew Jackson, Harrisonburg City Schools. This chapter addresses our changing understanding of gravitation and in doing so, introduces the student to a few interesting areas of astronomy and cosmology including dark matter and dark energy. It should be an appropriate extension to a study of Newton’s universal law of gravitation, but deals with gravitation from a purely conceptual approach. The appropriate high school level mathematical treatment would pertain to Newton’s universal law of gravitation and it is assumed that students will study this from traditional text or with their teachers. The chapter is set up in a dialogue style that has a wonderful heritage in physics going back to Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632.

  Chapter 2: Nuclear Energy by David Stern, Greenbelt, Maryland, is a short non-mathematical course introducing high school physics students and interested non-scientists to the physics of the atomic nucleus and to phenomena associated with nuclear fission. The commercial release of nuclear energy is discussed, including problems of controlling the reactor and the waste it produces.

  Chapter 3: The Standard Model by Michael Fetsko, Henrico County Schools. The first part of this chapter helps explain a couple of the remaining fundamental questions of physics: What are the building blocks of matter and what are the forces that hold these particles together? The current theory involves six quarks, six leptons, and four force carriers. All of these particles are organized into a table called the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Is the Standard Model complete or are there changes coming in the future?

  Chapter 4: Beyond the Standard Model by Tony Wayne, Albemarle County Schools. This chapter explains a number of current experiments in particle physics, the large particle colliders, and other equipment and instrumentation used in attempts to tease data that validates or rejects several emerging theories on the fundamental building blocks of matter.

  Chapter 5: Modern Physics by Angela Cutshaw, Newport News City Schools. This chapter has been cast into a series of major questions in an effort to lead the student through an understanding of how modern physics came about, some of its components, some of the still lingering problems in its theories, and some of its implications. Examples of some of the questions are: What is quantum mechanics and why did it develop? What part of physics was not complete? What is relativity and why did it develop? What are quarks and what role do they play inside the atom?

  Chapter 6: Nanoscience by Tapas Kar, Utah State University. Nanoscience is the discovery and study of novel phenomena at the molecular scale (between and ) and the creation of new concepts to describe them. New discoveries in science have enabled us to create more application-oriented products, new devices and electronic gadgets. Nanotechnology is the fabrication, production and application of man-made devices and systems by controlled manipulation of size and shape at that small scale.

  Chapter 7: Biophysics (Medical Imaging) by David Slykhuis, James Madison University; Mark Mattson, James Madison University; and Tom O’Neill, Shenandoah Valley Governor’s School. Today we have access to incredibly advanced non-invasive imaging technology for the analysis of our health. However, to most students, methods such as rays, MRI, and ultrasound are just black boxes that give the doctor a “magic” result. This chapter addresses these three major medical imaging technologies and their foundations in physics. Ultrasound is available in the first FlexBook release , followed by sections on MRI and ray in later releases.

  Chapter 8: Kinematics by John Ochab, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. Understanding how things move is fundamental to our understanding of the physical universe. Critical to this understanding is the ability to portray motion in a manner that is clear, accurate, precise, efficient, and reproducible. In the first part of the chapter, “Motion and How to Describe It,” we identify the terms used to characterize motion and illustrate the graphical methods used to represent motion visually. In the second part of the chapter, we study the work done by one or more forces on one or more bodies, determine the types of energy involved, and draw connections between the work done on the bodies and the energy changes in the bodies. Information is presented in tutorial format and includes an introduction to using motion sensors with a computer.

  Chapter 9: Laboratory Activities by Bruce Davidson, Newport News City Schools. This chapter presents physics experiments that utilize st century technology to conduct investigations that can be used in the high school classroom. The PASCO Xplorer GLX handheld interface is highlighted with downloadable labs on linear motion, Newton’s laws of motion, friction, momentum, conservation of energy, kinetic energy, energy transfer, and sound waves.

  Chapter 10: Modeling and Simulation by Mark Clemente, Virginia Beach City Schools/National Institute of Aerospace. Modeling and simulation have been used for design, test, evaluation, and training in the industry for several decades. With the advances in technology and computer capabilities in recent years, modeling and simulation are now tools for instruction that are accessible to most classroom teachers. This chapter presents several examples of how physics content can be taught using modeling and simulation.

  About the Authors

  Mark Clemente: Author, Virginia Beach City Schools/National Institute of Aerospace, Virginia

  Mark Clemente received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986 and his master's degree in education from Old Dominion University in 1996. He is a National Board of Professional Teaching Standards Certified Teacher and is currently an Educator-in-Residence at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), “on loan” from Virginia Beach City Public Schools. Mark has years of experience teaching chemistry in Virginia Beach. During that time, he has written and reviewed science curriculum, served as a Science Department Chair at his school, conducted many professional development workshops for teachers in the school district, and served as an adjunct instructor for Virginia Wesleyan College’s School of Educati
on. As an Educator-in-Residence, Mark is currently coordinating a modeling and simulation demonstration school project. The purpose of this project is to use modeling and simulation as an instructional strategy within mathematics and science instruction and to demonstrate ways to integrate mathematics and science instruction through the use of models and simulations.

  Bruce Davidson: Author, Newport News, Virginia

  Bruce Davidson has an MS in physical science education from Old Dominion University. A retired physics and biology teacher, he is currently working part-time for Newport News Public Schools in Newport News, Virginia. He currently works with new as well as experienced science teachers integrating technology and the hands-on experience into classroom instruction. He also provides professional development to science teachers using handheld data collectors to enhance students’ experimental experience. Outside of the classroom you will find him kayaking, biking and hiking. He currently lives with his wife and son (17 years) in Newport News, VA.

  Michael Fetsko: Author, Henrico County Schools, Virginia

  Mike Fetsko is currently a physics teacher at Godwin High School in Richmond, Virginia. He received his BS in multiple science from LeMoyne College and an MST in physics from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. He has been teaching all levels of high school physics since 1993 and he is always looking at ways to incorporate innovative ideas and content into his curriculum.

  Andrew Jackson: Author, Harrisonburg City Schools, Virginia

  Andy Jackson teaches physics and astronomy at Harrisonburg High School in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He teaches half-time, is the K-12 science coordinator for Harrisonburg City Public Schools, and part-time physics lab instructor at James Madison University. Andy received his BS in physics from JMU in 1987 and has been teaching various levels of physics since. Andy has been an active member of the Virginia Instructors of Physics since its inception and served as president from 1998–2006. He is a life member of the Virginia Association of Science Teachers (VAST) and has served VAST as Physics Chair, PDI Chair, and was President of VAST in 2008.