In the 2017 Spring Quarter, ZJUI received another group of faculty members from UIUC and ZJU. Prof. Mats Selen from UIUC and Prof. Zhang Jianbo from ZJU will co-lecture on “University Physics: Mechanics”; Prof. Vadim Zharnitsky will lecture on “Calculus II”, Prof. Gang Logan Liu “Introduction to Electronics”, and Prof. Volodymyr Kindratenko “Introduction to Computing”. Dr. Aaron LaDuke and Dr. Marilyn Holguin will continue to lecture on “Principles of Research”. In addition, Prof. Lu Xuanhui, Researcher Huang Kejie, Associate Prof. Cui Ning, Dr. Jiang Jiaqing and Dr. Zhao Dantong will provide guidance in experiment and discussion classes. Full of passion and hopes for lecturing at ZJUI, all the professors got oriented with the classrooms, laboratories and teaching equipment, and made careful preparations for the upcoming lectures before the new semester began.
February 27 marked the first day of the 2017 Spring Quarter. Before each class began, Executive Dean Prof. Philip Krein humorously introduced each professor to students.
Prof. Mats Selen, 2016 U.S. Professor of the Year, a senior professor at UIUC College of Engineering gave the first lecture of the course “University Physics: Mechanics”. The theory, discussion and experiment classes of the course are all based on the “SmartPhysics” teaching assistant system developed by Prof. Selen and his colleagues. The system fully leverages Internet and modern educational technologies, and has been popular among the UIUC students for many years. At present, ZJUI students have all registered at the system, and can have access to physics knowledge without the help of any physics textbook. The system includes all the contents covered by the course “University Physics”, the teaching and exam plans for a whole semester. It enables assignment release and submission, quizzes and student assessment. It allows professors to interact in real time with students, and accesses to students’ feedbacks and real-time experiment data so as to assess students’ understanding of course contents.
i-Clicker was also used for the first time at ZJUI classes. Prof. Selen raised questions at class, to which students responded via i-clicker. Each student’s answer was projected immediately on the screen. For example, when a vehicle speed experiment was illustrated, the vehicle’s speed curve immediately appeared on the screen. The students were amazed and acclaimed that such a teaching method was truly fresh and interesting.
It is expected that the i-clicker teaching can bring to students happy learning experience.