Where students own their education
It looked like a treasure hunt gone bad outside the Connaughton Room in Pierce Hall last year. Stowed in lockers were a box of eggs, a Clapper, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a set of dominoes, PVC pipes, a glass jar, pulleys, and a plastic racetrack — the raw materials for students’ design projects in Applied Physics 50 (AP 50), “Physics as a Foundation for Science and Engineering.” “We would throw out crazy ideas like mousetraps or Newton’s cradles or catapults,” recalled Ryan Alden ’14, a chemistry concentrator, “and the next day we’d have a bunch of mousetraps to play around with.” Grounded in a teaching philosophy that banishes lectures and encourages hands-on exploration, the course represents a collection of best practices gleaned from decades of teaching experience and studious visits to college physics classrooms nationwide. Considered the “applied” sibling to the “analytic, numerical, and experimental” Physical Sciences 12 sequence, AP 50...