Department of
Physics and Astronomy
Educational Programs
The Physics and Astronomy Department provides educational training
to approximately 1000 students a year in its undergraduate program
and approximately 100 students a year through the graduate program.
In addition, individual faculty members provide outreach educational
programs to the Philadelphia community. Examples of the latter include:
-
The Lincoln-Penn LASER Pre-College Program - An academically
rigorous enrichment activity for academically motivated middle
and high school students in grades seven through twelve. Special
emphasis is placed on recruiting African-Americans and other
students of color.
-
The Physics for Philly Program - Students from the University
borrow equipment and materials from the Physics Demonstration Lab,
drive to a local school and do a short demo. The goal is not so
much to teach science as to inspire interest in science. Using
materials that may not easily be available to local schools, the
aim is to create a fun experience that could lead to a
life-time interest in science.
- High School Physics Class - Fifteen to 20 high school seniors from
several nearby schools take their physics class at David Rittenhouse
Laboratory. The class is taught by a high school physics
instructor and follows the state-mandated curriculum, but uses the
classroom
demonstrations and
hands-on laboratory
experiments available for freshman classes at Penn.
- High School Teacher Interaction with Penn Research Activity - Reaches
out to and involves high school science teachers in Philadelphia
and their selected students by providing special lectures and presentations
at Penn. The first part of the program was a lecture in connection
with the
tenth anniversary of
Supernova 1987A. Members of the
Penn physics and astronomy department played an important part in the
observation of neutrinos from that supernova. As part of the lecture
series, teachers and students had dinner with Professor Alfred Mann
from Penn and Professor Masa-Toshi Koshiba from the University of Tokyo,
with additional lectures and informal discussion.
-
Interactive Textbook Project - A World-Wide Web-based text is
being developed for teaching first-year chemistry, physics, and
calculus. The text is used in a team-taught interdisciplinary course
on these three subjects. It integrates the curriculum topics through
"learning modules" that use digital animations, Java applets, Maple exercises,
and hypertext documents that present students with a fully integrated
set of resources for use in-class and during out-of-class work sessions.
The textbook and interdisciplinary course are part of an National
Science Foundation-sponsored project called the
Middle Atlantic
Consortium on Mathematics and Its Applications Across the Curriculum.
The MACMATC group includes Penn, Villanova, Community College of Philadelphia,
Polytechnic University, some Philadelphia high schools and the Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
-
Educational Outreach to Chesilhurst, New Jersey - A program
to provide distance learning education which provides hands-on,
interactive, practical problem-solving to motivate teenagers to
study. The Web page displays the curriculum for the current program
which takes place every Saturday between 9 AM and 1 PM at the
Chesilhurst Community Center. The program is sponsored in partnership
with the Coalition
for Youth and Family Development. Read more about this exciting
set of programs on the Web links.
Hits on this page since May. 2, 1998
