Computer Intensive Physics Robert G. Fuller

Portugal Conference

March 6, 19986 University of Nebraska - Lincoln

The paperless course I am talking about here is the one I taught in the spring of 1997, so I had more than one year of experience using electronic teaching before I tried the paperless class. As it turns out the technology and I are not ready for teaching totally without paper. Here is the opening page of the "Physics InfoMall." (See Figure 7).

of text. This CD-ROM was full of 600 megabytes of data. It has no movies. It is just text and graphics. The "stores" that college students use in my physics class are less than half of the mall. They use the articles and the textbooks.

In the Textbook Trove there are nineteen physics textbooks (See Figure 8). You can organize them into levels of mathematics used to discuss the lowest mathematical level we call "conceptual physics," very few equations. For example in these textbooks if you write "Newton's Second Law" it's in words, e.g. force is proportional to acceleration. There are five textbooks at the conceptual level of physics.

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