Brown Bag-Dr. Bruce Sherwood
Please join us for our next Brown Bag seminar on Wednesday, March 25. The seminar will be held in the Collaboratory Commons at the Friday Institute on NC State's Centennial Campus. Refreshments will be available at 8:30AM and the seminar will begin at 9:00AM. Our presenter will be Dr. Bruce Sherwood, Research Professor, who is a Distinguished Educator in Residence in the Department of Physics at North Carolina State University. His presentation is entitled 21st Century Physics for In-Service High School Physics Teachers.
"Matter & Interactions" is a calculus based introductory university physics curriculum for engineering and science students which features a contemporary perspective, with emphasis on parsimony (a small number of powerful physics principles rather than a large number of formulas) and on unification (for example, mechanics and thermal physics are treated as one integrated subject rather than two disjoint ones, and electrostatic and circuit phenomena are analyzed in terms of the same fundamental principles rather than completely different methods). The atomic nature of matter is emphasized throughout. Computational modeling is an important component of the course, using VPython. A version of this curriculum consisting of a semester of mechanics and a semester of electricity and magnetism (PY 581 and 582) is now offered to in service high school physics teachers in a technologically advanced distance education format, including innovative interactive lectures on DVD. The goal is not to train teachers to teach this university curriculum in high school (though a few teachers are now using it with students who take a second year of physics) but rather to give teachers a contemporary perspective on introductory level physics, which they did not experience when they were in college. During the distance education course teachers write reflections on their own learning, which are quite illuminating.
Bruce Sherwood’s main interest for many years has been Physics Education Research and Development (PERD), with the goal of improving both the content and the pedagogy of physics courses and curricula. With Physics Department colleague Ruth Chabay, he has authored the two-volume calculus-based introductory physics textbook "Matter & Interactions" written with Dr. Chabay, now going into its third edition. Bruce Sherwood joined NC State’s Physics Department in 2002, after previously serving on the faculties of Cal Tech, University of Illinois, and Carnegie Mellon University. He received his doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago in experimental particle physics in 1967.