John Jaszczak (Physics/A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum) recently gave two lectures while on sabbatical travel.
At Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) on Oct. 7, he spoke about “Mineralogical Miracles at Merelani, Tanzania.”
For the Cincinnati Mineral Society on Oct. 14 he spoke on “A Virtual Tour of the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum.”
Raymond Shaw has been awarded the 2016 Michigan Tech Research Award for his outstanding achievement in atmospheric research and scholarly endeavor. Read more about about professor Shaw’s research and the cloud physics research laboratory here.
In order from left to right: Bishnu Tiwari (Advisors: Dr. Yap and Dr. Zhang), Gaoxue Wang (Advisor: Dr. Pandey), and Fan Yang (Advisor: Dr. Shaw).
Congratulations to Bishnu Tiwari, Gaoxue Wang, and Fan Yang for receiving the Fall 2016 Outstanding Teaching and Outstanding Scholarship Award. They have demonstrated their exceptional ability as a teacher and commitment to their research.
We’re beyond the halfway point in most classes, and it may be a good time to take just a (metacognitive) moment to review progress and map the road ahead.
In my physics class, I ask students each day as part of their class preparation to attempt an explanation of a real or simulated physics result. The question is based on material to which they’ve just had their first exposure, by reading or video lecture. It’s challenging, and initially not well liked. But it’s definitely something at which students improve with practice. They become not only more willing to “guess,” but they begin to support their answers with evidence, independent research and/or mathematical analysis far more often.
When I recently told my students that I had begun seeing that progress, a number of them spontaneously reflected and then shared agreement that this was getting more comfortable. It’s easy to lose track, in mid-semester, of how far you’ve come already. And it can be highly motivating to students when they see progress. In a similar way, looking backward momentarily can sometimes help put what remains in perspective.
As a physics student, when I first learned about rotational motion, I missed the idea that every rotational quantity had a linear analog. I struggled mightily as I tried to learn rotational kinematics in about a week, and the pace seemed completely unreasonable to me given that we’d spent about seven weeks learning the same concepts for linear motion.
This week, as I teach the same material, I explicitly connect each new rotational quantity back to the linear one. This seems to help students not only absorb the new material but reinforces the old and makes the pace more reasonable. A look backward could be an open-ended reflection on progress, or an explicit challenge to make comparisons to, connections with, or predictions about what’s coming. It could be done as a formal assignment, an in-class exercise, as a “minute paper” reflection near the end of a class or through a Canvas survey or quiz.
If you’re looking for other instructional strategies (and don’t want to wait for next week), stop into or contact the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning.
Heather Lewandowski has been inducted into the Presidential Council of Alumnae. She received a B.S. Physics degree from Michigan Tech in 1997 and is currently an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Lewandowski’s lab, The Lewandowski Group, focuses on studying the collisions and reactions of simple cold molecules and ions.
Raymond Shaw (Physics/EPSSI) is the principal investigator on a research and development project that has received a $150,931 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Will Cantrell (Physics) and Claudio Mazzoleni (Physics) are Co-PIs on the project, “An Investigation of the Suitability of a Laboratory Cloud Chamber for Optical Radiative Transfer Measurements.”
This is the first year of a two-year project potentially totaling $316,374.
Teresa Wilson’s monthly series “This month in Historical Astronomy” is published on aas.org. This month’s topic is “Miss Mitchell’s Comet”. Read the complete article here.
John Jaszczak (Physics and adjunct curator of the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum) presented an invited lecture at the Denver Mineral and Gem Show (Sept. 16-18).
Jaszczak presented “Mineralogical Miracles From Merelani, Tanzania,” and brought an exhibit of faceted fluorite gemstones from the museum’s collection that were donated to the museum by the late Harold Dibble.
Images from “Interfacial Mode Interactions of Surface Plasmon Polaritons on Gold Nanodome Films” co-authored by Jae Yong Suh (Physics) appeared on the August cover of Applied Materials and Interfaces.
The article describes a method to create centimeter-scale lattices of gold nanodomes in order to study their optical properties.