Reform movements in physics education have shown the advantage of active methods in lively applications for improving students' conceptual understandings. Research has shown that the learning of diverse groups of students is enhanced by the use of multimedia. Intrinsically motivating instruction is based upon meaningful story lines and contexts that bring personal relevance to the topic students are studying. This project proposes to bring all of these insights together with a human-body-centric approach to transform conceptual physics courses. This project will result in a complete set of course materials, including a CD-ROM of video and numerical data for the study of human motions, and background physics notes that can be used in a wide variety of institutional settings to offer human-body-centric conceptual physics courses for diverse student audiences. In addition to the human-body-centric approach combined with human-based apparatus and multimedia, the interactive learning methods encouraged by these materials will be especially helpful to enable the students to learn by methods of inquiry.

The project staff at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, California State University Sacramento, and New Hampshire Community Technical College will develop human-body-centric modules of conceptual physics. They will field-test and assess the materials in cooperation with the evaluation consultants. The project will begin in July 2004 with incorporation of sample materials based on the revision of the Humanized Physics Project modules {www.doane.edu/hpp}. Materials developed at each institution will be field-tested at the other cooperating institutions and tested materials will be available for commercial distribution. By the fall of 2007, complete human-body-centric conceptual physics course materials supported by interactive multimedia and quantitative reasoning activities will be available for use across the nation. Faculty development workshops will be held using these materials. The use of these materials for the learning of conceptual physics concepts by inquiry methods will be advocated. The appropriateness of human-body-centric modules for the wide range of students in conceptual physics courses will be demonstrated.