Computer Intensive Physics Robert G. Fuller

Portugal Conference

March 6, 19983 University of Nebraska - Lincoln

I am going to describe this course and then at the end I want to tell you why it failed and now instead of calling in "Paperless Physics" it is called "Computer Intensive Physics" or "Paper-Lite", L-I-T-E. It means, like low-fat food, a physics course with just a little bit of paper in it.

be done electronically. Our vision was to see if that was possible and how that would change the way we taught physics and the way students learned physics.

I am going to describe this course for you. Fortunately it was part of a bigger project so we hired an educational psychologist to evaluate the course, to spy on what we were doing, to write down notes and to interview the students. I did not have to do the evaluation myself. I only had to try to figure out in this strange way, a way in which I could not write notes to the students, how could I teach them physics. First, I will give you a little bit of background of my own experience and then I will try to show you some photographs and describe what it was like for the students to do this physics course. There is now a long history of doing research in physics education.

Beginning in the 1950's and 60's in the United States the epistemological roots of our present work were planted(see Figure 3). In your proceedings is the summary work of Joe Redish giving some of these ideas (Redish, 1994) I no longer see a physics course as primarily teaching only physics. Very few students in the physics class ever become physicists, one percent or less.

3