Physics Majors Present Research at the 2022 Physics Education Research Conference

Cecilia Ochoa (C’24)
Max Webel (C’24)
Cecilia Ochoa (C’24) and Max Webel (C’24)

Physics majors Cecilia Ochoa (C’24) and Max Webel (C’24) attended the 2022 Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) held in Grand Rapids, MI, July 13-14. Both Cecilia and Max are conducting research under the mentorship of Prof. Leanne Doughty. 

Cecilia presented a poster titled “Investigating students’ fluency with quantum ideas in the context of interaction-free experiments”. Cecilia is analyzing student understanding of “quantum seeing in the dark” in two massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by Georgetown via edX. This work is in collaboration with Prof. Jim Freericks and Dr. Justyna Zwolak (NIST/UMD).

Max’s poster was titled “Case studies of computational thinking practices displayed by introductory physics students.” With the integration of computation into physics courses becoming more prevalent, there is a need to better understand how students engage in computational thinking. Max is applying a computational thinking framework to student interview data in order to identify the type and frequency of computational practices that students engage in.