Level 1 Headline

The Paradigms in Physics team is embarking on a new project to put detailed information about the various activities that we have developed on the web to encourage adoption by faculty at other institutions. We have already described our program as a whole in two papers (AJP 00, Physics Today 03) and a www.physics.oregonstate.edu/paradigms. But this is not enough information for people to be able to do what we do. We are currently experimenting with a wiki format so that users will be able to offer detailed feedback. We expect this site to be updated on a nearly daily basis. Check back often!

You may enter this website at three different levels: individual activities, sequences of activities that we have found work well together to achieve particular pedagogical goals, and descriptions of our whole courses.

We envision a site that has complete instructions for each activity, starting with an advertising-style splash page that will give a short description of the activity and a short description of the motivation and reflections on our experience. This spring, we will be focussing on making templates for ourselves about how this site will develop. Each activity will have links to Instructor's Guide type materials: pdf of the activity itself (both a blank version suitable for student use and a version with annotated solutions), information based on our experience about typical student difficulties in the classroom, guidelines about what resources (including time) are needed, recommended prerequisites and follow-up activities, etc. Our first sample activities can be found here: