1-26-04  By John Newsom Staff Writer
News & Record
GREENSBORO -- Four summers ago, UNCG professors Jerry Meisner and Harol Hoffman had good reason to feel optimistic as they went to Canada for a conference of physics teachers.
They had gotten a seven-figure federal grant to start work on their new project, a program that will let anyone with a computer learn introductory college-level physics.
They were enthused. But the high school teachers and college professors who sat in on their presentation at the conference were outraged.
"They said, 'You can't do that,' " Meisner recalled with a chuckle. "And then they said, 'You shouldn't do that because you will replace my job!'"
Since then, one federal grant has turned into three worth $4.2 million. Meisner and Hoffman are leading a team of 20 undergraduates and grad students who are creating much of the computer program from scratch and using video game technology for an even more ambitious project. And the initial hostility has turned to keen anticipation for a project expected to be finished in June 2005.
The project created by this husband-and-wife team is called "Learn Anytime Anywhere Physics," which replicates a physics lab inside a computer. With it, high school and college students can use a computer to do the same things -- conduct experiments and record and graph the results -- they would do in a traditional physics lab.
The program was originally aimed at college students who take courses online from their home. Since then, Meisner and Hoffman have received inquiries from traditional colleges and universities, high schools that lack the space and equipment for a decent physics lab and parents of home-schooled children.
"We know there's such a need for it out there," Meisner said.
Mike Turner, a physics teacher at Page High School and project team member, took the program for a test-drive last week.
He fired up the lesson on constant acceleration, which aims to teach students the relationship between speed and time.
A work bench with a cabinet above it appeared on the computer screen. Turner took the computer mouse and clicked on the cabinet to open it. Inside were a ramp, a wheeled cart, support poles, a ruler and gates. With a few clicks of the mouse, Turner moved the items from the cabinet to the table and soon had the car rolling down the ramp.
Every time the car made its trip down the ramp, the time from start to finish flashed on the screen. Turner switched to another part of the computer program and typed the recorded times into a spreadsheet. The numbers produced a graph.
The lesson continued. Turner had to time fictional stunt driver Crash Johnson as she wheeled her motorcycle between two points. When Turner finished this exercise, he had to use what he had learned to figure out exactly where to put Crash atop the roof of a building so she could jump safely to a second building across the street.
Throughout the lesson, a "teacher" popped up to ask Turner some questions. Some "students" chimed in, too, answering the questions and even giving some wrong answers. If students in a traditional classroom were using this program, Turner said, the real-world teacher would guide them through the lesson.
Everything looked fun and realistic -- even the dialogue between the computerized teacher and students.
"We're not making this up," said Turner, who is writing the lessons that the UNCG programming team is turning into computer animations. "These are the things my students have said and things that Jerry's students have said."
Meisner has long had an interest in both physics and technology. A full professor, he has taught physics at UNCG since 1970. He also developed and taught the school's first online course, in astronomy, in 1997.
During his time in the classroom, he noticed something: His students learned physics better when they could see and touch what they were doing rather than when they memorized complex formulas from a textbook. Recent research in physics education has backed up that impression.
"If you had asked one of my students about a formula," said Turner, a former student of Meisner's at UNCG, "they would have said, 'It's on page 37 in the book.' It would never have occurred to them how it got on page 37 of the book."
All of those experiences gelled in 1999, when Meisner and Hoffman applied for and got a federal grant for the Learn Anytime Anywhere Physics project. Meisner became the project's director. Hoffman, an educational anthropologist, managed the program's day-to-day operations.
Since then, Meisner and Hoffman have revised the program to take advantage of more advanced computer technology. They started with a two-dimensional version of the physics lab, which the programming team has refined to look more modern and appealing to a generation raised on video games.
The team has developed a 3-D version that will let students zoom in and out and rotate the work bench to get a better look at their lab experiments. The team has started work on an advanced 3-D lab, which uses video game technology to let up to nine people share the same computerized lab.
The original two-dimensional version is being tested now in high school and college classrooms across the country and overseas, and more requests to take part in these tests keep rolling in. Early reports from the testers have been largely positive, Hoffman said. A teacher at a high school in Greece reported back that his students found the work fun and interesting.
The good feedback has pleased Meisner and Hoffman. They are especially proud that audiences at later conferences have applauded the project and asked when they can get their hands on it.
For the record, Meisner and Hoffman are not trying to put teachers out of business, despite what their early detractors said.
"No, no, we never thought that," Meisner said with a laugh. "We thought they were crazy."
Contact John Newsom at 373-7312 or jnewsom@news-record.com |
