Outreach

Boston University Upward Bound
As part of the Physics Department’s $3.5M National Science Foundation Graduate Students in K-12 education (GK12) initiative, a BU Physics graduate student assisted in the BU Upward Bound program for Boston area youth struggling to complete high school and matriculate to college. The student helped plan and assisted in physics labs, tutored students individually and in groups in afternoon study sessions, and attended the end-of-summer awards ceremony.

GK12 Boston Urban Fellows
Physics graduate student Eva Cornell partnered with a physics teacher from English High School as part of a GK12 fellowship. Cornell worked actively in physics classes through the year to help develop new curricula, add content expertise, assist students with in-class assignments, and mentor students for their science fair projects. Through her experience, she gained invaluable experience in translating concepts in physics and from her research into effective lessons in an immersive, urban teaching environment.

LERNet
Throughout the school year, the teaching laboratories have worked in coordination with LERNet, BU’s Learning Resource Network, to conduct educational and enrichment activities for local middle-school and high-school students. This year Professor Rob Carey hosted students from Bedford High School. LERNet, run by Cynthia Brossman, also hosted a Physics Day for high school students in May (see below).

Physics Day at Boston University
The department participated in the fifth annual Physics Day sponsored by LERNet and coordinated by Director Cynthia Brossman. The event attracted 250 high school students and teachers from around the city. Professor Andrew Duffy and Lecture Demonstration Coordinator Val Voroshilov performed a physics demo show titled “Under Pressure” that highlighted the force of atmospheric pressure. In addition, graduate students Sebastian Remy and Kaca Bradonjic developed a presentation on “Light and Magnetism” that opened with a light show accompanied by music. Graduate students David Sperka, Cory Fantasia, Clare Bernard, Yiming Xu, Nick Lubbers and Xiao Luo presented demos on particle physics and showed a clip of the movie ‘Angels and Demons’. Following the clip, Professor Tulika Bose skyped in from CERN to explain the fact and fiction about antimatter and explain her research on particle collisions. All the students and participants enjoyed a barbecue at the conclusion of the program.

PROSTARS
Programs in STEM Academic Retention and Success (PROSTARS) is a National Science Foundation grant that designs, implements and evaluates programs geared toward increasing retention and graduation rates of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) students at Boston University. Activities are largely focused on underserved STEM students, including students from urban schools, women in physical sciences and engineering disciplines, and students who matriculate with test scores and other indicators that our data demonstrate lead to a higher than average STEM program attrition. Read more about PROSTARS.

Improving the Teaching of Physics
Improving the Teaching of Physics (ITOP) is a joint effort between the Physics Department (co-PI: Andrew Duffy) and the School of Education (PI: Peter Garik), and also involves Arthur Eisenkraft of the Center for Science and Mathematics in Context (COSMIC) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. ITOP is funded by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education; the project is currently in the third year of its second three-year grant.

The goal of Project ITOP is to address a serious shortage of high school physics teachers. A large number of teachers who instruct physics in high schools do not have a solid background in the subject, and/or are not licensed by the state to teach physics. Through Project ITOP, teachers can take up to ten graduate-level courses (CAS NS540 through CAS NS549), which cover all the physics they need for their own classrooms, including the conceptual history of physics and reading selections from the Physics Education Research literature. Each of these courses lasts two months, meeting once a week, with teachers taking five courses between the beginning of September until the end of June. The program began in 2004, and in 2008 it was expanded to Chicopee, Massachusetts, with one set of teachers taking BU courses off-site at Chicopee Comprehensive High School.

In 2009-10, our teaching labs provided space and laboratory equipment for all 10 of the ITOP courses, with the following schedule:

NS540 Concepts in Physics I: Force and Motion (Fall 2009)
NS541 Concepts in Physics II: Rotation and Gravitation (Fall 2009)
NS542 Concepts in Physics III: Fluids, Heat, and Thermodynamics (Spring 2010)
NS543 Concepts in Physics IV: Electrostatics and Magnetostatics (Spring 2010)
NS544 Concepts in Physics V: Harmonic Motion, Waves, and Geometrical Optics (Summer 2010)
NS545 Concepts in Physics VI: Electromagnetism, AC Circuits, and Physical Optics (Fall 2009)
NS546 Concepts in Modern Physics I: Quantum Physics (Fall 2009)
NS547 Concepts in Modern Physics II: Special Relativity (Spring 2010)
NS548 Computer Modeling of Physical Phenomena (Spring 2010)
NS549 Everyday Applications of Physics (Summer 2010)

More than twenty teachers enrolled in the program this year in three different groups. One group met every Monday in the BU Physics Department, and was taught by Lecturer Manher Jariwala. A second group met every Thursday in Chicopee, and was taught by Master Lecturer Andrew Duffy. Those two groups took courses NS545-NS549 (they had done the previous five courses in 2008-09). A third group, which started in Fall 2009, took the NS540-NS544 courses this year, and met every Friday in the BU Physics Department. The teachers in that group were taught by Nick Gross of BU’s Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling.

The involvement of the Physics Department in Project ITOP continues to be a major outreach effort. Courses from Project ITOP have now been taken by approximately 60 teachers, many from Boston Public Schools, but others from Revere, Newton, Holliston, Franklin, Brookline, Manchester-Essex, Quincy, Chicopee, Springfield, Orange and Agawam, among others. With such a large number of teachers having taken these courses, the Physics Department has made an important contribution to schools in the Boston area and across the state in the teaching of physics.

Immersion for Elementary Teachers
In the summer of 2007, the undergraduate labs hosted an intensive two-week workshop for elementary teachers, covering light and optics. This workshop, called Immersion in Geometrical Optics, was privately funded by a three-year grant from Stephen Bechtel. In July 2007, 15 elementary teachers attended the workshop (enrolling in the two-credit graduate-level School of Education course SED SC531), which ran for 7 hours a day, every day, for two weeks.

In early 2008, Professors Bennett Goldberg and Glenn Stevens (Math) won a major new grant from the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education in the STEM Pipeline program, to expand the teacher immersion program. That summer, immersion expanded to two workshops, each begun with five three-hour pre-workshop sessions in May and June (hosted by the undergraduate physics labs). The intensive two-week session in July was supplemented with classroom follow-up visits and formal evaluation. Several papers in physics education are in the works. Each course is now associated with a four-credit graduate-level School of Education course. These courses are SED SC532 (Immersion in Geometrical Optics, one section of 15 teachers) and SED SC533 (Immersion in Green Energy, two sections of 15 teachers each). The Optics workshop is covered by Goldberg’s Bechtel grant, while the Green Energy workshop is funded by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education STEM Pipeline grant.

In 2009 and 2010, using the same funding from the Stephen Bechtel Fund and the STEM Pipeline, the Immersion in Green Energy course was taught with 26 participants. In Summer 2009, a new four credit immersion course was introduced, SED SC 534 Immersion in Global Energy Distribution, which focused on how energy is distributed around the Earth, and how this determines global climate patterns and eventually climate change. Immersion in Global Energy Distribution is being offered again this summer.

During the academic year, the participants from both Immersion in Green Energy and Immersion in Global Energy Distribution met for four call back sessions. Those sessions, also grant funded, allowed the participants to hear about the lesson plans their peers had implemented based on the workshops, and receive additional coaching from project staff on the best methods for teaching. Attendance was good considering academic year schedules and the distance that some participants needed to travel.

Research Internship Program
The BU Research Internship Program in Science and Engineering, co-founded by Professor Emeritus George Zimmerman, entered its 32st year of immersing high school students in the world of scientific research. Featured in the BU Metropolitan College newsletter, the program enlists faculty mentors in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, Engineering and Psychology to help students explore their scientific interests and prepare for the rigor of college-level study and research.

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