Weekend food for thought

Let me share a few random points as weekend food for thought: 

(1) Interesting new paper by Gerd Kortemeyer on arXiv presenting an artificial-intelligence based chatbot's (ChatGPT) response to various introductory physics problems: See this link. How is physics education going to be impacted by such a technology in the near and distant future?  

(2) I listened to a podcast a couple of days ago (Physics Alive by Brad Moser; amazing physics education podcast by the way!), where Carl Wieman, Nobel laureate and educator in physics, discussed the active learning approach. He really provides a number of convincing arguments why active learning is superior to conventional lecturing. See also the well-respected article by Deslauriers, Schelew and Wieman entitled "Improved learning in a large-enrollment physics class" published in Science in 2011. Another interesting discussion related to this topic can be found on the Nature website. Is active learning really the best approach to teaching and learning? 

(3) On Monday, I am going to teach an introductory experimental physics class on thermodynamic cycles. Unfortunately, time will be limited to 90 minutes, but I think this is going to be a lot of fun and a great chance to discuss applications such as refrigerators, Otto engines, steam engines and heat pumps. We are also going to show class demos (e.g., a Stirling engine). I will probably need most of my weekend to prepare the lecture. Is it normal that instructors need so much time to prepare a course that they have never taught before? Well, the Yale Teaching Center provides some tips as to what you should consider when preparing lectures. The most important points for me are: cover less content and embrace imperfection.

(4) Last question for today (and the upcoming weekend): How can we measure student success? Are written exams and tests suitable means? I don't think they are, but this is a question I want to think about a bit more in the next weeks; please do reach out to me if you have any recommendations for literature on this topic.