DESCRIPTION: There are some interesting overlaps between Modeling Instruction, based on Hestenes’ work, and the Karlsruhe Physics Course (KPK), a German high school curriculum based on a coherent approach to physics. The ideas behind KPK were originally conceived for university, then developed and tried with younger and younger students, down through elementary school.

In this seminar we will compare the overlap between KPK and Modeling, especially around the teaching of energy, electricity, and chemistry. We will also introduce the big ideas of KPK — the primary model is water flowing (current) through a resistance, driven by a pressure difference (figure a). This flow model can be made quantitative, and simulated using tools like Stella (figure b). The model can then serve as an analogy for other systems by replacing the physical quantities — for example, an electric potential difference drives a charge flow through a resistor.

By the end of this seminar, we hope to start a discussion about additional similarities and differences between KPK and Modeling, to learn and adopt from each other.

Corrado Agnes is presently Retired Professor of Physics from the Polytechnic School of Engineering  of Turin, Italy. He regularly teaches the PhD Course “ An Alternative Method for the Teaching of Physics, and continues to collaborate with the Teacher Training Programs in the field of Physics Education, which is his main research interest. Since the 80’s he joined the research group of the Karlsruhe School of Physics Didactics(http://www.physikdidaktik.uni-karlsruhe.de/), whose ideas and methods are at the core of the proposed seminar.

Joel Rosenberg is an engineering educator who loves to find and share good teaching ideas. He has been a high school chemistry teacher inBoston Public Schools; a curriculum developer at the Lawrence Hall of Science, TERC, and the Museum of Science in Boston; a project manager with Make Magazine and howtosmile.org; a museum presenter at the Museum of Science; and a toy designer at Intel.

Workshop Presentation Materials:

Here is the link for powerpoint. It's about 40mb, with the videos included:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17350522/KarlsruhePhysicsAndModeling.pptx

And here's a PDF version with the notes that's less than 8mb, though some of the links are messed up when clicked, either because they span a couple of lines, or because for some reason Powerpoint adds an exclamation point to URLs (copy-and-paste still works):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17350522/KarlsruhePhysicsAndModeling.pdf

Many of the links to resources are in the notes for the slides, but just in case here is the main link to the Karlsruhe books in English (could be posted with the files):
http://www.physikdidaktik.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication/pub_fremdsprachen/englisch.html