Related papers: A course on Climate Change and Sustainable Buildin…
The pursuit of particle physics requires a stable and prosperous society. Today, our society is increasingly threatened by global climate change. Human-influenced climate change has already impacted weather patterns, and global warming will…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
Climate Change is an incredibly complicated problem that humanity faces. When many variables interact with each other, it can be difficult for humans to grasp the causes and effects of the very large-scale problem of climate change. The…
Smart buildings have great potential for shaping an energy-efficient, sustainable, and more economic future for our planet as buildings account for approximately 40% of the global energy consumption. Future of the smart buildings lies in…
This article describes an undergraduate physics module at a university in England that places year 3 student physicists in secondary school classrooms for a semester. This is done as a way of introducing them to the occupation of secondary…
Research has shown that it is challenging to change departmental culture to support the adoption of transformed teaching practices. Michigan State University is working to transform its introductory physics courses by engaging faculty in…
A key challenge in complex design problems that permeate science and engineering is the need to balance design objectives for specific design elements or subsystems with global system objectives. Global objectives give rise to competing…
Abstract: The rising global temperatures caused by climate change significantly impact energy consumption and electricity generation. Fluctuating temperatures and frequent extreme weather events disrupt energy production and consumption…
We present the relatively less known thermodynamic concept of exergy in the context of ecology and sustainability. To this end, we first very briefly outline thermodynamics as it arose historically via engineering studies. This enables us…
Energy concepts are fundamental across the sciences, yet these concepts can be fragmented along disciplinary boundaries, rather than integrated into a coherent whole. To teach physics effectively to biology students, we need to understand…
Nowadays, software is pervasive in our everyday lives. Its sustainability and environmental impact have become major factors to be considered in the development of software systems. Millennials-the newer generation of university…
Environmental sustainability is a major and relevant challenge facing computing. Therefore, we must start teaching theory, techniques, and practices that both increase an awareness in our student population as well a provide concrete advice…
We have designed an introductory laboratory course that engaged first-year undergraduate students in two complementary types of iteration: (1) iterative improvement of experiments through cycles of modeling systems, designing experiments,…
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
Engineering a sustainable world requires to consider various systems that interact with each other. These systems include ecological systems, economical systems, social systems and tech-nical systems. They are loosely coupled,…
As the frontiers of biology become increasingly interdisciplinary, the physics education community has engaged in ongoing efforts to make physics classes more relevant to life sciences majors. These efforts are complicated by the many…
At many physics departments a significant fraction of teaching is in support of engineers and scientists in other majors. These service courses are thus an automatic crucible of interdisciplinary interaction, and at times, strife. For…
These lectures start with the mean field theory for a symmetric binary fluid mixture, addressing interfacial tension, the stress tensor, and the equations of motion (Model H). We then consider the phase separation kinetics of such a…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed…
This article describes the successful revitalization of an undergraduate physics program. The areas of curriculum development, undergraduate research experiences and advising and retention, to name a few, are emphasized in this…