General Information
Participants in the Honors Introductory Physics course will engage in
the following activities each semester:
- They will use class time to engage in learning exercises that
synthesize information from the 130X introductory physics courses,
allowing them to find more breadth and depth in the subject of
physics.
- They will have access to expertise from outside the classroom
environment, including faculty, staff, and students from SMU and other
institutions, as well as individuals with a physics background working
in private industry. The goal here is to enrich their learning
environment by giving them direct access to experts at various levels
of the field.
- They will engage in a coherent, semester-long project. Preparing
for, and delivering, this project will be the focus of various
activities throughout the semester. Honors students will be expected
to learn to present their work to an audience, including (but not
limited to) their peers in the Honors Introductory Physics course.
- Students will pass or fail the section based on an assessment of
their work and participation, to be determined by the
instructor. Students will engage in a semester-long Grand Challenge
problem-solving exercise. This will define the arc of the semester,
setting the tone for planning out classroom activities and eventually
defining the deliverable at the end of the course. In between class
periods relevant to the development of solutions to the Grand
Challenge Problem, the students will be engaged in demonstrations of
physics principles and exercises to explore these
demonstrations. These class periods will follow a pattern consistent
with the scientific method: observation of a physical phenomenon,
hypothesis building to explain the phenomenon, and calculation and
testing to assess the hypothesis.