Industrial R&D Activity

Sometimes there’s a skill or content area you want your students to have, but it doesn’t represent a full course’s worth of material. Or, it’s an as-you-need-it skill to apply to a particular project or situation. Already utilized in several disciplines, the pop-up course is just as applicable to physics education.

The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has prototyped a number of pop-ups that bring skills to students. Need your students to gain basic electronic assembly skills? Build Arduino-based projects? Learn a 3D CAD program? A short, one- to few-day experience may be all you need to achieve the learning goals. Taught outside of the “usual” course structure, pop-ups let you enhance student learning without, necessarily, complicating course scheduling and teaching loads.

Activity Description

Learning Objectives

• Students see how many technologies have been developed through industrial R&D
• Students appreciate the role of serendipity in discovery
• Students are aware that industrial research leads to real scientific discovery, in addition to cool technologies
• Students learn how to give a 5-10 minute oral presentation, to an audience from diverse backgrounds (i.e. faculty and peers)

Duration

Home prep followed by in-classroom presentation (120 minutes/5-10 min per student)

Target audience

Sophomore physics majors

Suggested context for implementation

You could invite students to suggest their own technologies, provided they are focused on applications or apparatus.