Guilford College: Donald Smith Publishes Two Articles

Press release from Guilford College:

November 3, 2021

Guilford College Physics Professor Don Smith has two articles in the November 2021 issue of The Physics Teacher, one of the professional journals of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

The first article was written in collaboration with former Theatre Studies Instructor Brian Coleman (now at Oklahoma City University). It presents the interdisciplinary three-week immersive course on the Physics of Theater Lighting Design that the two teachers developed together for the fall 2019 term. Students carried out physics experiments in the mornings to learn about circuits, lenses, light, and color. They then spent the afternoons in the theater, learning how to realize their ideas through the craft of design. The course culminated in the students developing a design for a musical that had been simultaneously produced in a three-week performance class.  

Donald's second article describes the work he has been doing to integrate machine learning tools and techniques into introductory and general education classes. In particular, as part of a series of online laboratory exercises necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, he developed a scaffolded sequence of activities to teach non-science students how to train a neural network to classify images of different types of galaxies. They then tried their own skills to see if they could beat the computer. The journal article describes the activities and how they build on each other. It concludes by assessing the effectiveness of the activities in helping the students learn, as well as the impact they had on the students’ ideas about machine learning.

News and Events
Faculty and Staff Announcements

This press release was produced by Guilford College. The views expressed here are the author’s own.