Computer Enhanced Learning
This page is provide for archival purposes. Please see our Education Resources site for the latest.
Thanks to the CELI team for suggesting that we offer pages describing the
uses of instructional technology in our physics courses. Follow the links
below to find out what we are doing with computers and instruction.
Students in the general physics laboratories and second-year labs use their
Thinkpads to monitor and control experiments.
Class Web pages
All of our teachers use Web pages to post course information, and most importantly,
homework solutions. The astronomy course uses the web for last-minute weather-related
changes, with links to weather forecasts. Many faculty use CourseInfo from Blackboard
for some or all of their web postings; this software eases creation of online
quizzes and provides restricted access to materials when needed.
We have begun a project to place videos of all classroom demonstrations
in the introductory courses on the Web.
Online exercises prepare students for class discussion.
Astronomy labs are subject to the whims of Mother Nature. Students can
check the Astronomy Web Page to find weather reports and the expected lab
to be done this evening. Full lecture notes are also available.
Star maps, stellar evolution, and more.
Circuit simulation software dramatically enhances the learning of electronics.
Symbolic math software allows assignment of more intellectually challenging
and realistic physics problems.
Spreadsheets provide powerful aids to understanding physics. Students use
Excel for graphing and simple analysis in the first courses, while performing
nonlinear least squares curve fitting by the second year.
The first tutorial software for introductory physics that we believe will
significantly improve learning.
Physics majors need to know how to program. The Unix environment is the
one they will see most often for scientific programming. Our students beging
programming in a Unix environment by the second year.
The ray-tracing package Zemax extends the scope of optics problems that
students can address.
C.W. Yip has developed a Shockwave application that allows students in a class
to cast votes via a Web page. Useful in things like ClassTalk and Peer Instruction.
Computational physics calculations often result in enormous amounts of data.
Most of the time, it is impossible to simply read the resulting data files and
obtain any useful imformation. The best way to glean information from large
sets of data is to view it graphically. Greg Cook and students are working to
tailor a multiplatform application for this purpose.
Or is it, Web documents as dissertations? Thomas Law has received permission
to prepare his dissertation as a Web document. He sees this as much more than
just having his dissertation available via the Web. He believes in the value
of having a document that is not constrained by the linear sequential view of
a document imposed by traditional print media. Visit http://www.wfu.edu/~lawct
to read his thoughts on why
this is important.
Step-by-step instructions on how to hook up your ThinkPad and use the AV equipment
to display items in the main classrooms.
Visit the CELI
page to learn about other computer enhanced learning activities at Wake
Forest.
Send comments on this page to matthews@wfu.edu.
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