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2	"Challenges and constraints" Challenges and constraints Large classes 50-450; fewer staff Teaching vs. research Varied high school science education Funding for staff/teaching developments Waning interest in enabling sciences “The new realities of the student experience largely concern the change in priority students now give to their time at university…[they] appear to be less engaged with university life generally and with study in particular… [they have many more choices about when, where and what they will study, and how much commitment they need to make to university life.” (Craig McInnis, 2003)
3	"Even ‘old" Even ‘old’ physics is complex: The speed of light is a constant in vacuum The laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames (Einstein,1905) “Any particular thought in our [Lecturer] head embraces a vast amount of information. But when it comes to communicating a thought to someone else [the poor student], attention spans are short and mouths are slow. To get information into a listener’s head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest [whether deliberately, through a predilection for egocentric communication or simply too busy and tired to care]” (Stephen Pinker, 1994)
4	Learning and Teaching Imperatives Communicating (difficult) concepts Students learning a new mathematical language Graduate skills (attributes) to be addressed Problem solving skills The product of a university education? How are our graduates ‘superior’ to contemporaries who didn’t go to university?
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13	Artist’s Impression
14	Technology Enabled Active Learning Classroom Whiteboards fill the walls. Seats 117 undergraduate students Technology allows large class sizes to work effectively via mics, projectors etc.
15	Lecturn for academic – several projectors and a document scanner for small demos. Also note the mics for students responding to questions
16	Compare Teal (95% attendance) with boring lecture hall where attendance (40%) is now a real problem
17	5-6 groups of 5 students Each group has one blackboard and one experimental setup.
18	Class Discussion ->Hands on Activities -> Class Discussion Girls showed drastic performance improvement
19	Traditional table set up in upper years lab, no obvious educational vision that ties first year and later years together.
20	Summary MIT and UC Davis have custom designed their labs to enable a certain flexible teaching style to be implemented that combines elements of lectures, tuts and traditional labs in a collaborative setting. Compare with Berkeley who are planning folding walls, movable tables etc but have made no firm commitment to any direction in pedagogy. Which model is preferable?
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23	Why do we need yet another learning environment? A physics student’s perspective
24	"Dry" Dry Difficult Irrelevant Elitist
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26	Adaptation to the ‘Modern Student’ Attention span Different priority heirarchy Everyone learns different, like The Customer is always right
27	Effective incentives to learning Marks Chocolate Fun
28	Interface lectures, tutorials and laboratories Reinforcement (positive) Learn concepts from multiple perspectives Practical introduction to difficult concepts and problem-solving Fun?
29	Interface lectures, tutorials and laboratories Reinforcement (positive) Learn concepts from multiple perspectives Practical introduction to difficult concepts and problem-solving Fun?
30	Constraints on Apparatus Simple Demonstrative Quantitative Fun Compact Inexpensive
31	Process: Hardware Production Design Prototyping Feasibility/Scalability Mass Production
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33	Impact on Students
34	Some Exploratorials So Far Pilot studies The ‘Real Thing’
35	Circular Motion
36	Centre of Gravity
37	"Relate to practical examples" Relate to practical examples
38	Electromagnetism and Capacitors
39	"Relate to" Relate to practical examples
40	Working Structure
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44	Do you know where the ball is going to land?
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46	Future developments Multimedia enhancements Video illustration of physical processes Animations to clarify unseen processes Applets for pre and post work activities Monitoring and evaluation as development processes
47	Monitoring and Evaluation Observation and feedback to build on most effective exploratorial activities Focus groups Surveys Comparative performance data with previous years
48	What we want to achieve Fully integrate lecture, tutorial, laboratory processes into an engaging, high performance learning system Share ideas and experiences with staff involved with other courses
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