Rennie Selkirk from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and PI the TICOSONDE Balloon Sounding Project will give a talk Friday, May 26 at 10 am in JBWS 362 (the physics lab room).

“The TICOSONDE Balloon Sounding Project: Profiling Water Vapor, Ozone and Sulfur Dioxide in Costa Rica Since 2005.”

All are welcome to attend.

SELKIRK-Ticosonde

Drs. Gary Morris and Paul Walter have a publication that appears in the March issue of The Physics Teacher titled, “Transition Matrices:  A Tool to Assess Student Learning and Improve Instruction.” Common multiple-choice diagnostics are often given to students at the beginning and end of a semester to assess how much learning has taken place.   Previous work by Dr. Morris provided a way of ranking the answer choices from worst to best.  This work constructs a 5 x 5 matrix for each question that provides the percentage of students that made each pre-/post-test selection possibility and makes it easy to determine whether students are not just moving to the correct answer but also if they are at least making some progress by moving to a better wrong answer.  This can provide valuable information for an instructor.  The authors constructed a tool to perform the analysis that is freely available to physics instructors.  The approach was applied to the Force Concept Inventory for first-semester introductory physics, but can be adopted and applied to other similar multiple-choice diagnostics where the wrong answers function as distractors.  The abstract is available at http://aapt.scitation.org/toc/pte/55/3?expanded=55.  A freely available version of the article is available on the arXiv at https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01565.

Drs. Walter and Morris also published 2016 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings titled, “Assessing Student Learning and Improving Instruction with Transition Matrices.”  The proceedings are freely available at http://www.compadre.org/per/perc/conference.cfm?Y=2016#PRP89.  One interesting finding in that work is that the likelihood of moving to the correct answer choice on the Force Concept Inventory was independent of which wrong answer choice was chosen on the pre-test.  Future work will investigate whether that holds true for larger data sets and various instructional approaches.

The folks from UT-Austin’s NASCENT Nanotechnology Center will be giving an informational session on Monday, March 6, 5 – 6 pm in JBWS 362.  The 3-course sequence Hands-on Nanotechnologies are online and students receive kits to complete labs throughout the semester.  Each course will count as PHYS 3345 Special Topics in Physics credit at SEU.  Please see the attached flyers and let Paul Walter know if you have any questions.   Come attend the information session to meet the instructors, see an example of the labs, and get a feel for the topics covered.

Flyer_Hands-On Nanotechnologies Certificate Program

NASCENT-Flyer

There have been three more launches from St. Edward’s recently.  The took place from just outside of Moody Theatre on September 1st, 4th, and 11th.  Once processed, data from the flights is hosted on St. Edward’s Institutional Repository at http://ir.stedwards.edu/ozone/.

September 1 launch (AT004):
Our weather balloon launches are funded by the Capital Area Council of Governments (CAPCOG) and on this day Matthew Holderread from CAPCOG joined us.  Graduate students Kelsey Emmons and Chris Cormier along with undergraduate Gilbert Rivera all helped with the balloon launch.

September 4 launch (AT005):
Launch prep during the September 4 launch.  Kelsey Emmons, Gilbert Rivera, and fellow undergraduate Andy Barnes all helped with the balloon launch.  During this phase the balloon train is assembled and they are filling the balloon about 15 minutes prior to launch.  The first five balloon launches thus far all traveled far to the west of Austin.  The winds are changing and our next flight (AT006) traveled to the east.

September 11 launch (AT006):
Chris Cormier and undergraduates Anais Matalet and Valeria Gonzalez helped with the balloon launch.  As soon as the balloon is let go everything happens quite quickly.

https://vine.co/v/5JjOZQ2I6jP

After this launch we were notified by Jack and Jane Willy of our ozonesonde instrument landing in their backyard.  A special thanks to both of them for letting us retrieve one of our instruments, which are partly re-usuable.

If the wind conditions are favorable, we will launch Monday, September 12 at ~1 pm just outside of Moody Theatre.