Programme ViCEPHEC

Variety in Chemistry Education /Physics Higher Education Conference 2016

Durations:

Keynotes 55 mins

Workshops 90 mins

Oral presentations 15 mins

Oral bytes 5 mins

Book of abstracts: http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/16817/

Some sessions contain flipped material which can be found at the following link: http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/16805/

Physics Keynote Speaker

Opening the Lab, Prof Ian Bearden

Introductory labs are often "closed" assignments leaving no room for students to do any actual science. Such labs lead to poor habits of mind. Not only do they lead many students to believe that the role of experiment is to confirm already known theory, they also make them think that the quality of an experiment is solely determined by how close the results are to tabulated quantities. I will argue that many of our "traditional" introductory labs can be transformed from closed, "cook book" experiments,to open experiments that can show students more accurately how science is actually done. Such an approach invites students to be much more active in choosing how to perform experiments and teaches them that the measure of quality of an experimental result is not how close one comes to previous results, it is rather the uncertainty on the result. Evaluation, both short term (course) and long term (year-to-year) , of the results of courses using this approach will be discussed.

Ian received his Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Hendrix College in Conway, AR in 1987. His PhD research in gamma-ray spectroscopy was performed at Argonne National Lab and he received a PhD from Purdue University in 1993. Since then, he has been at the Niels Bohr Institute where he became "lektor" in 2003. Ian's research is in Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Physics; he is a member of the ALICE collaboration at the LHC. He was head of studies at NBI from 2008-2012 and is presently Professor with special responsibilities for the development of teaching and curricula. Ian is also a member of the EPS Physics Education Division board, the IUPAP International Physics Education Committee, and Vice-chair of the Danish Physical Society. His teaching is primarily focused on laboratory exercises for first year physics students and pre- and in-service upper secondary physics teachers.

Chemistry Keynote Speaker

The ChemTube3D Story: the power of Open Educational Resources, Prof Nick Greeves

ChemTube3D http://www.ChemTube3D.com is a unique collection of over 1200 web-pages containing interactive 3D molecular animations for use in lectures and private study. This talk will focus on the development of the resource, principally by undergraduate students, supporting such a project financially, the use of Google Analytics to drive development, and a novel approach to linking traditional textbooks to online resources.

Nick Greeves is a Cambridge graduate, obtaining his PhD there in 1986 for work on the stereoselective Horner-Wittig reaction with Stuart Warren. He then held a Harkness Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at Stanford University, California, with Barry Trost and a Research Fellowship at Cambridge University before joining Liverpool in 1989 where he was promoted to Professor in 2015. He was selected for a HEA National Teaching Fellowship in 2009 and SFHEA in 2014. Nick is married with two children and lives in Formby. His interests include Macs, music (iPhone), photography (iPhone), and social media. He is saving up for the next version of Apple Watch.