The design I ultimately chose to go with for my graduation cap highlights my passion for physics and electronics by incorporating (and recycling!) various electronics components. These components were all either malfunctioning or broken beyond repair (blown fuses, dead IC chips, etc.) and were no longer useful to keep in the Agnes Scott College electronics lab.

“Graduation Cap” by Lizzie Apel is licensed under CC BY NC ND 4.0.

Rather than throwing them out, Dr. Ackerman generously donated them to me so that I could affix them to my graduation cap using a combination of hot glue and spray-on acrylic sealant. I also chose to paint a phrase on my graduation cap- I went with a song lyric from the musical RENT that mentions the physics concept of entropy, a phenomenon I have always found to be rather poetic in nature.

I chose to film and edit a video showcasing the finished product. The video explains some key features of the Arduino Oracle and shows the possible outcomes the device can display. The classmate I worked with on this project is credited above, as well as in the description of the Youtube video embedded below, and she has given her permission for this video documenting our work to be featured on my digital portfolio. The background music used in this video, “Ambient loop.mp3” by freesound.org user bebeto, is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0 and is used for non-commercial purposes with attribution.

My group chose to make a video explaining the basic physical structure of transformers, as well as the difference between “step up” and “step down” transformers. Our video instructs viewers in how to apply the transformer voltage ratio in order to determine which category a given transformer falls into. My contributions to this project consisted of script writing, delivering the second half of the audio narration which focuses on introducing the transformer voltage ratio equation, and editing the final project. The two classmates I worked with on this project are credited in the description of the Youtube video embedded below, and they have both given their permission for this video to be featured on my digital portfolio.

My group chose to make a video explaining how to read and create truth tables for the basic digital logic gates. Making this video helped me realize that I learn best by explaining a given concept to someone else- as a result, creating this mini video lecture was very helpful in cementing my understanding of truth table interpretation. My contributions to this project consisted of script writing, drawing all of the visual aids seen in the video, and editing the final project. The two classmates I worked with on this project are credited in the description of the Youtube video embedded below, and they have both given their permission for this video to be featured on my digital portfolio.

As my summer internship with World of Speed Motorsports Museum draws to a close, I believe it would be prudent to take the opportunity to re-visit each of the four learning objectives I identified for this course towards the beginning of the summer. I established these learning objectives with the goal of isolating and articulating specific skills I could focus on developing or acquiring over the course of my internship, skills that I believe would be useful both in my internship workplace as well as in future employment opportunities down the line.

The first of my learning objectives was to create a curriculum plan for elementary school children in grades three through five containing a week’s worth of lessons and classroom activities relating to STEM, automotive technology, and vehicular physics. I met this learning objective! Under the guidance of my supervisor Katie Williams, and in collaboration with my coworkers Ben and Nashmy, I planned, designed, and typed up the curriculum for two weeks of camp- our “Girls Rule!” STEM and female empowerment focused camp for elementary school girls, as well as our Technology camp for third through fifth grade. The curriculum for each camp contained activities centered around science, technology, engineering, automotive physics, and vehicular design. In “Girls Rule!” camp, I planned activities for my students such as deconstructing and rebuilding small engines, engineering paper airplanes, growing crystals using principles of basic chemistry, designing aerodynamic Pinewood Derby cars, and building simple circuits. In Technology camp, my students worked on video game design and coding, electrical circuits, digital design and 3D printing of weight-balanced and bouyant boats, and engineering of “battle bots” using Lego Mindstorm robotics sets. In creating the curriculum for these camps, I learned valuable lessons regarding time management, classroom management, and itemizing lists of supplies needed for various projects.

My second learning objective was to develop my professional communication skills through email, phone, and in-person interactions with guest speakers, off-site vendors, and volunteers on behalf of my organization. I met this learning objective as well- over email I organized a guest speaker appearance for our Girls Rule camp from local race car driver Vicki Shepherd, as well as additional staffing help throughout the Girls Rule camp from museum volunteer Tammy-Sue, and a visit from the “Alien Bob” team at Oregon Tech Institute. (“Alien Bob” is an educational tool/game for children, developed by a robotics club at Oregon Tech- it is essentially an outer-space/extraterrestrial themed game of “Operation,” where students use tweezers to carefully remove various space debris from a six foot tall alien figurine.) I also communicated over the phone with Pat’s Acres, the off-site vendor we use for go-karting in our racing camps, and I spoke in person with employee representatives of Woodburn Dragstrip when we brought our campers there for an off-site field trip to watch quarter mile drag races. At the last minute, one of our planned guest speakers for Girls Rule, race car driver Cindi Lux, was unavailable and unfortunately had to cancel her visit due to a family emergency. In order to fill that hole in our schedule, I organized a substitute visit/talk to be given by the mother of one of our longtime returning campers, who works in the tech industry and enjoys amateur autocross racing in her free time. Through all of these interactions, I prioritized professionalism, courtesy, kindness, and a cooperative, flexible attitude, so as to best represent my organization, and I noticed that communicating on behalf of the museum became slightly easier each time that I was given an opportunity to do so. In the future, now that I have this bank of experience in professional communication on behalf of a company, I expect that I will feel less apprehensive about representing the people I work for over phone or email.

My third learning objective this summer was to familiarize myself with the simple and child-friendly 3D digital design program Tinkercad, to the point where I could lead my summer camp students through a Tinkercad design exercise with confidence. I met this goal as well- yesterday, I conducted a Tinkercad design exercise with my Technology camp students, where I helped them design watertight “boats” to be 3D printed, with the end goal of having a competition to see which team’s boat could hold the most pennies without sinking. Prior to beginning the activity, I created accounts for each team using Tinkercad’s “teacher/educator” option, and then once they were all logged in, I gave a demonstration of how to use each of Tinkercad’s built in design tools. I have never personally used Tinkercad, however I watched my coworker Rob lead students in this same activity earlier this summer. After viewing my demonstration, my campers seemed comfortable operating Tinkercad unassisted, and each team of students was successfully able to design a boat. After a brief training from my coworker Ben on how to operate our 3D printers, I managed to print all six boats with no trouble. By overseeing this exercise, I have developed competency in two additional pieces of software, gained experience in leading a “demonstration” for an audience of how to navigate a program, and familiarized myself with principles of three dimensional digital design, all of which could easily be useful in a career geared towards engineering.

My fourth and final learning objective was to work one-on-one with special needs students in our summer camps in order to improve my understanding and awareness of the ways which students with ADHD, autism, and sensory processing disorders learn differently. As someone with diagnosed ADHD myself, and as someone with multiple autistic family members, I am committed to learning how to best accommodate the unique needs of individuals with developmental disorders or learning disabilities, and how to best help advocate for them in the classroom. With the help of my supervisor Lewis, I spoke with two teachers at Victory Academy, a nearby school for students with autism, in order to learn techniques to help make students with sensory needs more comfortable in the classroom. Additionally, over the course of the summer, I worked one on one with several special needs students in order to help them navigate frustration or sensory overstimulation in the classroom, and in the process I learned that offering a chance to “step outside for a moment” is an incredible first line of defense against campers having meltdowns or bad classroom experiences- I have learned to pay close attention to which, if any, of my students appear frustrated or overwhelmed, and I have learned to intervene before they hit the meltdown point by simply offering them a chance to leave the stressful environment, collect themselves, and recenter their minds. One specific project the museum took on this summer in order to be more welcoming to all guests was to design a backpack of sensory supplies such as earmuffs, fidget toys, and weighted vests for students with different sensory needs to check out from the front desk and use during their museum visit. After meeting with Victory Academy, my supervisor Lewis made a list of supplies to purchase, and World of Speed successfully created two “sensory backpacks” which are now available for checkout at the museum’s front desk.

• I want to learn how to make a curriculum plan for teaching elementary school children by designing and scheduling a week’s worth of lessons and activities related to STEM, automotive technology, and vehicular physics.

• I want to develop professional communication skills by communicating on behalf of my organization over email to organize and schedule guest speakers, volunteers, and off-site field trips for summer camps.

• I want to become familiar and comfortable with the 3-D digital design program Tinkercad by observing my coworkers using it, with the goal of being able to confidently lead my summer camp students through a Tinkercad 3-D printing design exercise all by myself.

• I want to improve my understanding and awareness of the ways which students with ADHD, autism, and sensory processing disorders learn differently by working with these students in our summer camp one-on-one to accommodate their unique needs and help advocate for them in the classroom. As part of this learning objective, I want to help the museum with a related project- developing and putting together a backpack of sensory supplies (earmuffs, fidget toys, weighted vests, etc) for students with different sensory needs to check out from the front desk.

Right before I sat down to write this reflection, I signed and faxed back all the paperwork confirming that I will be spending this upcoming summer working at World of Speed motorsports museum again, this time as their Summer Education Intern! So, needless to say, my job and the responsibilities it entails have been on my mind as of late, and it’s gotten me thinking about connections that can be made between the things I’ve learned this semester in lab and the ways in which I can apply them to my summer instructor position. As I’m writing this, my lab partner and I are in the middle of our self-guided final lab experiment, which is an expansion on/reworking of the Coulomb’s law torsion balance experiment that Abigail and I conducted earlier this semester. Our goal is to redo the experiment using a new set of conductive spheres we manufactured in lab out of ping pong balls and a graphite paint conductive coating, to see if improving the conductivity of the charged spheres will result in data that lends itself to a Coloumbic force vs distance graph better fitting the theoretical model.

When Abigail and I first proposed this idea for our final lab, I knew it would involve some degree of hands-on building/creating/engineering in regards to manufacturing the new conductive spheres, but I hadn’t realized quite how extensive this process would be! We spent our first day in lab just making the spheres. It made me realize that I haven’t really built or created anything by hand all semester, which is something that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing. Working on this lab has allowed me to remember exactly how much I thrive in hands-on learning environments, and how instinctive the process of building something often is for me. Lab always involves a degree of hands-on involvement, but this lab in particular, between the manufacturing of the spheres and helping Dr. Ackerman reassemble the broken torsion wire assembly in the torsion balance, has more specifically involved a lot of taking things apart and putting them together, which I am beginning to suspect may be my true wheelhouse.

This skill is one that’s directly relevant to my job this summer as well as my future career goals, as my summer camp instructor position consists in large part of helping my students build hands-on engineering projects such as hydraulic powered cranes out of plastic medical syringes, wooden skewers, and cardboard, as well as helping them take apart and then reassemble things like lawnmower engines, RC cars, and simple circuits. Additionally, in the future I hope to continue working in the automotive education department at World of Speed, perhaps helping teach auto mechanic skills to high school autoshop classes hosted by the museum, a job where the hands on practical skills of assembly and disassembly are critical.

In some capacity, I’ve always known that building things with my hands is something that I have a knack for, but prior to this class, I had never really thought to connect that to a directly scientific application, especially laboratory science. It’s interesting and validating to see that those two skill sets can intersect in this way! It’s helped me realize that I can bring my aptitude for practical engineering to my job this summer in a way which also incorporates the more cerebral and academic elements of my physics education, and attempts to integrate the two. For example, lab this semester has taught/reminded me of the importance of lab safety, for instance always washing our hands before leaving lab especially during the Nuclear Spectroscopy experiment, handling liquid nitrogen very carefully and wearing long pants and close toed shoes, practicing good electrical safety with the high voltage power supply used in the Coulomb’s law experiment, painting the conductive spheres outside due to the paint’s carcinogenic fume hazard, etc. Safety in lab/technical settings is crucially important, and it’s a huge responsibility of mine when I am working with my students at summer camp to keep them safe and ensure they are following safety protocol. I feel that practicing lab safety all semester in this course has been an excellent refresher course and gotten me firmly into the habit of paying attention to safety protocol.

This semester of lab work has also made me far more comfortable with the reality of equipment breaking or not working as anticipated, and has given me experience in thinking on my feet to either fix it or come up with a workaround or an alternative solution. For example, the torsion wire snapped in lab yesterday while Abigail and I were attempting to measure its torsion constant, and I then had to help Dr. Ackerman replace the wire, which was a bit of a daunting prospect, but in the end was totally doable. Abigail and I have had experiments not go as planned other times as well, such as when the ceramic superconductor broke in our superconductivity lab. We ended up designing an alternate experiment where we measured properties of a resistor as a function of changing temperature, which proved to be educational and interesting as well. This flexibility and willingness to change course and pursue a different plan is a skill I’ve intentionally been trying to cultivate this semester in lab, as I recognize that in the past I have had a tendency to get swamped in stress and anxiety when my academic work doesn’t go the way I had originally planned. Paralysis of indecision helps no one, and I’ve come to realize that an ability to think on my feet, restrategize, and regroup will not only make me more academically flexible and confident, but also more able to anticipate and react to situations like these happening at work this summer. If there’s a shortage in supplies or a last minute change of schedule and I am not able to lead my students through a planned activity, as happened several times last summer, I now feel more confident in my ability to swiftly come up with a plan B, or troubleshoot a way to make the original plan work.

I think earlier in this semester, I often felt anxious that I wasn’t learning as much in lab as I felt that I should, or maybe that I wasn’t understanding the physics as much as I was supposed to. I’ve since come to realize that maybe the point of lab is less about understanding the precise ins and outs and minutiae of every single physics concept we study, and more about learning practical skills such as teamwork, flexibility, time management, resilience, patience, focus, and safety precautions- or at least that’s my takeaway. Lab has, more than anything, ultimately taught me a lot about the ways in which I learn, such as which techniques help me feel confident in the material (writing everything down as I go, explaining things to my lab partner, working hands on, remembering that I can still get worthwhile learning out of an experience even if I don’t get every detail of the academic work perfect) and which don’t (stressing about time or details, not writing things down in lab, relying on the process of writing the lab report to teach me the physics instead of learning it myself during the prelab phase). I’m of the firm belief that you cannot be an effective teacher without a healthy degree of self awareness as to the ways in which you yourself learn, so as someone with a learning disability who plans to go into education, often of children who also have learning disabilities, the reflection component of this course has been of great value to me. Between the reflections in this course helping me externally process the revelations I have had about my own learning style, and the multiple talks on education and specifically physics education and accessible physics education that we have had in my physics colloquium class this semester, I feel like my strengths as both a teacher and a student have been further developed, and I have lots of new ideas as to ways I can include and accommodate students with different learning styles, better help all of my students overcome their own learning anxiety, and engage more fully with the material.

One connection I have made recently is that as I continue to gain experience in technical and professional writing with an instructional, procedural purpose (such as the lab reports and lab notebook entries I’ve made for this class), I am also furthering my skill and comfort levels in step by step, instructional writing (including troubleshooting guidelines!). This is a skill that will be very helpful in my job/internship with World of Speed this upcoming summer, as part of my job responsibilities include writing up step by step instructional curriculum material to help the museum’s education department document how to guide students through different hands on engineering projects, activities, and experiments.

It’s a unique and important skill set to be able to communicate a set of technical directions in a clear, concise, and approachable way that anyone can pick up and follow, and I am gaining increased appreciation for the “presentation of procedure and results” part of experimental laboratory science for helping me develop and strengthen this skill set- though, as I discussed with Dr. Ackerman earlier today, I have room for improvement in the “concise” department, and aim to work on my ability to edit my technical writing for brevity. In particular, the goal of “make it understandable by someone with intro level physics background knowledge” when writing a lab report has an interesting parallel to my goal of “make it understandable to someone with an education background who has not performed this activity with children” when writing up project curriculum for my job.

Another new goal of mine in this class as well as others I am enrolled in (E&M, Problem Solving) is taking full advantage of any opportunities to further my learning by making connections between the material I’m learning in each of my courses at a given time. For example, the last experiment I did in this class was Magnetic Force and Torque, and I realized upon starting the experiment that my understanding of torque was not as robust as I would like it to be, so I asked Dr. Lovell if we could spend some time solving torque problems in Problem Solving. This allowed me to strengthen my learning of the topic from multiple angles, AND get the most out of both classes. I could learn about torque academically in Problem Solving and study it hands-on in lab, while gaining a better background understanding of the theory behind torque so as to understand the lab procedure more thoroughly.

Forming these types of topical connections in the material of different classes has always helped me to feel more engaged and synthesized in my learning, which is very motivating for me as a student- if I feel like everything is “clicking,” I feel more confident in my own academic abilities, which historically helps me to relax and focus more on the process of learning as opposed to worrying about academic performance. Also, making connections between the things I am learning in different classes helps me to see the “bigger picture” in a way- it helps all my classes feel more worthwhile, because it gives me a taste of how the things I am studying in class on the small scale can synthesize in a more widely applicable way. Right now in E&M, we are wrapping up our study of electrostatics and starting our exploration of magnetostatics- this conclusion and final review of the theory behind electrostatics connects nicely with the lab my lab partner and I are currently working on, which studies the Coulombic force between two stationary, geometrically identical, charged spheres at various distances between the spheres’ centers and at various charges.

In addition to discovering opportunities to foster my technical and instructional writing skills and focus on getting the most out of my classes by trying to seek out topical connections between their material, I am also excited by the opportunities presented by the final lab project in this class, especially the brainstorming and research and experimental design stages. Earlier in this semester, and in the past in general, I would feel a fair bit of nervousness and apprehension towards the idea of designing an experiment all by myself- the thought of initiating lab science independently without external guidance brings with it a laundry list of places where I could make mistakes or make poor choices that will undermine the strength of the experiment later, in the execution stage.

However, the introspection and analysis of my own learning patterns that have been encouraged by this class through the reflection assignments have helped me to understand daunting challenges in science as an opportunity to lean in and learn and trust the uncertainty and hesitance for what it is: merely an indication that you have more to learn! I have become more confident in my own lab skills through this course, and I am now excited by the concept of brainstorming experimental setups that could let me investigate things I find genuinely interesting or exciting, or perform labs which have obvious ties to my intended work post-graduation in the automotive industry.

Finally, the final lab idea brainstorming process has been exciting for an additional reason. At the moment, I am in the process of designing and executing my own self-guided, independent, open-ended physics problems in Problem Solving, so I have many opportunities ahead of me to make connections between the self-guided project design journeys in each of these two different classes. I am optimistic that both projects will shed light on each other!