Odón Manuel Sánchez
Departamento de Ciencias Básicas
ITESM
Campus Querétaro
Querétaro, México
osanchez@campus.qro.itesm.mx
Monterrey Tech System is a private and independent institution
consisting of 26 campuses at 25 different cities in Mexico.
Three Introductory Physics courses are offered at Monterrey Tech in the majority of engineering and science programs. Officially these courses are called Physics I, Physics II, and Physics III. The topics covered in the first course are; vectors, kinematics, dynamics, work and energy, momentum and impulse, rotation, equilibrium and elasticity, and gravitation. The topics for Physics II are; fluid mechanics, periodic motion, waves, thermodynamics, and optics. And Physics III includes; electricity and magnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics. The official textbook is University Physics, Eighth Edition by Young [2], however there is certain freedom to use similar textbooks at different campuses like Tipler [2] and Serway [3].
The Introductory Physics courses are given on a semester basis (except in summer), and the load for each course is eight credit hours. This means that an average student should work eight hours per week on each course. The student uses three of the eight hours to attend the lectures. It is convenient to mention at this point that an average student at Monterrey Tech takes six courses per semester similar in load to the Physics course.
Officially a laboratory section is offered in the Physics II and III courses. The laboratory section uses one hour of the eight credit hours of the course load (some campuses offer the laboratory section in all three Physics courses, like Campus Queretaro). There are different forms to approach the instruction of the laboratory at different campuses, depending on the different situation of each campus (laboratory infrastructure, budgets, number of students, etc.). In this way, some campuses offer a laboratory section of two hours every fifteen days. There are other campuses that offer every week a short practice (one-hour). There are campuses that join the lecture with the laboratory, performing demonstrations and experiments during the lecture. In some campuses the students perform home experiments and demonstrations which are presented to the teacher or the class as projects or assignments. We can also find combinations of these different techniques to approach the laboratory work, and the use of computers to simulate experiments. There is also the use of Institutions with laboratories outside Monterrey Tech to perform some practices.
Teaching Introductory Physics courses at Monterrey Tech, from the author's point of view, is an interesting challenge, because; (i) The initial motivation to study Physics from the students is low as expected from the teacher. (ii) There are some topics in Physics for which the students do not have the appropriate mathematical background. For example, it is necessary to teach the concepts of kinematics in Physics I from the point of view of calculus (limits, derivatives, and integrals), however, these topics are taught to the students at a later time in the course of Mathematics.
Next I will mention some techniques to tackle the two points mentioned above. These techniques have been evolved from sharing some experiences with my colleagues mainly at Monterrey Tech. Let's think of the teacher as a guide that has to take the students from an initial to a final point, and let's think in two possible forms to accomplish this process; (i) In the first case the teacher is highly motivated towards teaching, however, the students in general have little or no motivation towards the process of learning Physics. This attitude from the students can be seen as a resistance to the motion. And at the end the teacher has to drag the students to the final point. This process generally produces a sentiment of frustration among the students, and the teacher. (ii) In the second case the teacher shows the students the final point, and a sketch that leads to the final point. The teacher then concentrates the efforts to generate the motivation in the students with the objective of using their own energy to move the group as a whole. Under this perspective the teacher can feel sometimes how the students in general push their way towards the goal, dragging some other students in the process, and helping in this way to the general motion of the group.
Of course the question here is how to move the group as a whole instead of dragging them along the way. In order to explore some of the possible answers we will start assuming that the students before being students are humans, and that there is a group of activities that motivates humans per se. Among these activities we can mention; exploring, discovering, understanding, building, performing work that is hard and creative, and reaching goals (Robert G. Fuller [4] explores three aspects intrinsically motivating in the Physics learning experience; fantasy, challenge, and curiosity). The teacher can now plan and construct the course based on this group of activities. In this way, the teacher not only aims to cover the material of the course, but the teacher constantly is searching and performing activities that naturally motivates students. This way of work is normally much harder than just lecturing, and this hard work is usually perceived by the students, and it stands as an example to follow. In order to teach the course based on the activities mentioned above, it is necessary for the teacher to develop sensitivity towards the general emotivity of the students. It is this sensitivity the one that gives direction towards choosing different learning activities along the course. The system can make every lecture of every different semester to be a different and rewarding experience, this is especially helpful when the teacher has to teach the same course for several years.
The main objective of this talk is to present a series of examples that stimulates the students in a natural form during the experience of learning Introductory Physics.
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