Abstract
A physics course is designed to promote scientific thinking and epistemologies among nonscience majors by drawing on everyday experiences and analogies when learning quantum mechanics.
Highlights
Developing a course in “modern physics” for students who have not studied advanced physics and mathematics presents challenges and opportunities that can be addressed using the results of the physics education research (PER) community
We describe the design principles that guided the creation of the Intuitive Quantum Physics (IQP)
Because the course was not based on canonical mathematical problems in quantum physics, we were free to think differently about how we modeled systems
Summary
Developing a course in “modern physics” for students who have not studied advanced physics and mathematics presents challenges and opportunities that can be addressed using the results of the physics education research (PER) community. It is far too easy to answer the call to bring “the physics of the last century” to high school or general education students by having students memorize disconnected facts, watch computer simulations that they are unable to interpret, and leave with discouraging epistemologies and attitudes about the process of science Rather than promoting their abilities as life-long learners, such courses stifle them. Our objective in creating a course called Intuitive Quantum Physics (IQP) was to create an effective course in quantum physics for nonscientists that avoided these pitfalls and strengthened our students’ understanding of science. We describe the design principles that guided the creation of the IQP
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