I have worked with Professor Szilvia Kadas (Art and Art History) twice under the umbrella of the Common Problem Pedagogy project, a program that seeks to foster a culture of interdisciplinary work on open-ended and ill-defined problems. This work was fit into my PHY 203 classes. While not an obvious place for such open-ended questions and collaborative work, my impression has been that it has worked very well and that it has given students important opportunities to think about communicating with people (artists) with very different skill sets, and to practice this communication in the form of writing technical reports for a non-expert audience.
The connection between these projects, often focusing on some aspect of population dynamics, to the content of PHY 203 comes through the subject of oscillations. Specifically, we discuss how simple population models, such as the Volterra predator-prey model, can exhibit oscillations like a pendulum. In this way, the equations describing population models can be viewed as a natural extension of the differential equations describing the motion of a pendulum, and we talk about how to build/interpret such mathematical models.
Course materials:
Special lecture for PHY 203 on modeling population oscillations
Special lecture for ATS 340 (Graphic Design II) on how physicists model the world
Examples of student work:
2020 COVID-19 projects:
Jose Diaz-Duran
Avery Tompkins
Victoria Killfeather
Dakota Wagner
Tyler Edgar
2019 projects (varied):
Olivia Wilburn
Karl Hipius
Josh Hagadorn
Links to publications and publicity:
2021 article submitted for review (January 2021)
2020 article published in the Journal of the Scholarship of Engagement (JoSE)
2020 SUNY Cortland Bulletin article, ”Physics and graphic design students work together on COVID-19”
2019 SUNY Cortland Bulletin article, “SUNY Cortland’s Academic Odd Couples Address Real-World Problems”