Building upon the institute's mission to benefit society through research integrated with education, Caltech is opening its doors to 23 diverse and gifted high school sophomores and juniors this summer. The LEAD Summer Engineering Institute, held on campus July 6–27, gives students the opportunity to explore Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (or STEM) careers.
Classes are in full swing this week, marking the beginning of the school year for students at Caltech. For some lucky freshman, that means spending a bit of quality time with faculty members. Seven new freshman seminar courses were introduced to the curriculum this fall; in each, 12–15 students are paired with professors to discuss topics in-depth and outside of the lecture halls.
Kip Thorne, Caltech's Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, has been selected to receive the 2012 John David Jackson Excellence in Graduate Physics Education Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).
Paul D. Asimow, professor of geology and geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), has been awarded the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching—Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor. Asimow was selected for his "exceptional energy, originality, and ability to explain complicated concepts effectively," according to the award citation.
Tom Harris came to Caltech with an undeclared major, thinking he would study computer science. But, having been an avid Lego builder as a kid, he was drawn to mechanical engineering. He also has an interest in medieval history, which similarly dates back to his childhood—he loved pirates and knights, and both his parents were history majors—and after he took Brown's medieval history class, his impression of the study of history changed.
Field geologists at Caltech come face to face with bears and wolverines, climb steep cliffs and mountains, and endure scorching sunlight and frigid temperatures. Sometimes risking life and limb, they travel to some of the most remote corners of the globe—all in the name of science
During the inaugural Caltech InnoWorks Summer Science Camp at Pasadena City College, Caltech undergraduates led 22 middle school students through a week of hands-on science and engineering projects. With the slogan "By Students, For Students," InnoWorks aims to get underserved middle school students more interested in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.
École Polytechnique and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) signed an agreement to establish a master's education exchange program on March 5, 2013. This program allows selected students from both institutions to follow an intensive joint program in Aeronautics or Space Engineering, as well as Mechanics (both fluids and solids).
To expand its involvement in online learning, the California Institute of Technology will offer courses through the online education platform edX beginning this October.
The edX course platform is an online learning initiative launched in 2012 by founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Caltech's rigorous online course offerings will join those of 28 other prestigious colleges and universities in the edX platform's "xConsortium."
Finding common ground between schoolchildren and quantum-mechanics researchers is no easy task. After all, understanding quantum mechanics—the physics that governs the behavior of matter and light at the atomic (and subatomic) scale—can be daunting even for some physicists. However, through a recent collaboration with Google, researchers at Caltech have created a new space for this unlikely interaction—in the world of Minecraft, a popular video game.
Steven C. Frautschi, professor of theoretical physics, emeritus, at Caltech, has been awarded the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching—Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor.
Named after Caltech physicist Richard P. Feynman, the prize is awarded annually to a Caltech professor "who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation in undergraduate and graduate classroom or laboratory teaching."
When you first walk into Bruce Hay's genetics class, it looks like any other 21st-century college lecture hall: the professor, backed by his PowerPoint slides, faces a room full of students with iPads. However, as Hay delivers a lecture about the mechanisms that inhibit gene expression, a rectangular yellow bubble suddenly pops up on the screen below his lecture slide. It's from a student, asking a question about RNA interference. Soon another bubble pops up, this one with a link to a video that explains how microRNAs can affect the color pattern of flower petals. Other bubbles branch off from each other, and hands rise into the air.
Suddenly, you realize you're in the classroom of the future.
Those pop-up bubbles are a key component of a new interactive lecture format made possible by an app developed by two Caltech alums and brought to campus by Caltech's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach (CTLO). The iPad app—produced by Su-Kam Intelligent Education Systems, or SKIES, named after cofounders Julius Su (BS '98, BS '99, PhD '07) and Victor Kam (PhD '08)—is now being used in several classes on campus.
"It's been known for a long time that lecturing—just a professor teaching and the students passively listening—is not an optimal way for students to learn. You always want to have students doing some thinking, some processing, and some recall during the lecture," says Su, who is a CTLO program manager in addition to being one of the cofounders of SKIES.
With this in mind, Su and his colleagues at CTLO have been experimenting with ways to change the traditional Caltech classroom. The SKIES app is based on one such approach—active learning, which gets students participating in a variety of ways, and is supported by a great deal of evidence indicating its effectiveness.
The wiki-like app facilitates this kind of active learning by allowing students to directly interact with lecture materials both inside and outside the classroom. The app compiles and connects notes, links, videos, and other materials—contributed by students, teaching assistants, and the professor—into a branching tree of collective knowledge stemming from an initial seed of slides or other multimedia material.
This concept of students and teachers interacting to create knowledge together is what drew Professor of Biology Bruce Hay to become one of the first users of the SKIES app in 2012.
 Students can ask questions during Hay's lecture in the SKIES app. The questions or comments pop up below the lecture slide in real time. |
"The big struggle that I have—and that lots of people have—is just getting students to ask questions; getting people to turn the class into more of a discussion rather than just the lecturer speaking," Hay says. "I knew that Julius and Victor were developing this prototype, and I thought, I've been teaching this same course for 15 years now and maybe this would be a good idea, to just try something new that might make it a little more interactive."
In the three years Hay has used the app in his genetics class, he says the app has done just what he'd hoped it would: provided an alternative channel by which students can participate. During class, Hay says students often add cards to his lecture slides as a form of public note-taking; for example, in one lecture, a student added a card to a particular slide, saying, "Professor Hay says this would be an excellent exam question." After class is over, he says, students often post cards with questions about the day's materials; these can then be addressed by Hay or the class's teaching assistants, either directly in class or through another branch of cards in the app.
Hay says that the app lets him monitor what students are contributing—and it allows him to promote and highlight information he considers particularly helpful and relevant to understanding the lecture material. Conversely, the app also allows students to rate how well they understand his lecture slides, as well as the cards added by TAs and other students.
"After class, I take a look at the reviews to see how well the students understood what we talked about in class that day," Hay says. "If I see that a slide is rated green [the app's version of a thumb's up], I can assume that it was pretty straightforward and understandable. But if the students have rated it red, I can add extra material to the slide, like additional text or figures. Then, in the next class, I can go back and say, 'It looks like this part was a little bit difficult. Let's just go back and review it again before we go on to the new stuff.'"
Although these continuous double checks require a bit more effort on the part of the professor and the students, they seem to be paying off: Hay says the average grades in his class went up by almost a full grade point after his first year using the app. The improvement was so noticeable, he says, "it was actually almost frightening. That was probably the biggest indication this was making a difference in terms of learning, instead of just making it fun for me and them."
 In the SKIES app, students create dialogue by adding 'cards' that branch off of the professor's lecture slides. |
Hay says the added content from students in the SKIES app over the past three years has enabled his course "tree" to grow and improve each term. "I'm not just repeating all the same slides every year. Many of the slides stay the same, but now I add new things, based on what the students found helpful in terms of explanations, quiz questions, and examples. So everyone is involved in making the course better," he notes.
After hearing about some of the app's early successes, other instructors across campus began using SKIES in their courses. This includes Bill Goddard, Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics, who has used SKIES to teach lectures and manage group projects in his computational and theoretical chemistry classes; Jeff Mendez, lecturer in chemistry, who has used SKIES to teach the lecture portion of his freshman solar chemistry lab; and Yaser Abu-Mostafa, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who has used SKIES to promote and manage discussions in the in-class portion of his well-regarded Learning From Data MOOC, which has attracted over 200,000 students within and outside Caltech since its inception.
The app is also being used by many Caltech outreach programs, such as the Summer Research Connection, the Community Science Academy, and Harry Gray's Solar Army, to broaden the impact of university initiatives at the K–12 level; and is being used to teach several classes at Pasadena City College, as well as in several local middle schools and high schools.
SKIES is currently only available on iPad and iPhone, and as the app's popularity has grown, support from the Provost's Innovation in Education Fund and the Bechtel Foundation fund has allowed CTLO to expand the use of SKIES on campus through the purchase of more iPads. In the future, Su hopes that the app's reach will grow even further, both on iPads and eventually by expanding the app to work on other operating systems.
Aside from those few comments on the hardware limitations, Su says the feedback he and his colleagues at the CTLO have received from professors and students who have been using SKIES has been overwhelmingly positive.
"CTLO is continually providing Caltech faculty and TAs with evidence about what helps students learn more effectively. Active and collaborative approaches tend to work well," he says. "This app is just one way to foster more active and collaborative learning, but I think we can already see that it's providing new ways for professors to make classes even more lively and engaging for students at Caltech."
Science teachers across the country are constantly looking for new ways to develop lessons and experiments that will engage their students while also aligning with state-adopted education standards such as Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). By creating new interactive Community Science Events for local science teachers, and with funding from the Pasadena Educational Foundation (PEF), the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach (CTLO) is encouraging these educators to use cutting-edge laboratory research at Caltech as inspiration to make their K-12 lessons in STEM fields more creative.
The adoption of new state educational standards can translate into big changes in the classroom. The Community Science Events encourage teachers to implement these standards with lessons and activities connected to contemporary research topics, says Julius Su (BS '98, BS '99, PhD '07), CTLO program manager and event co-organizer.
The events, collaborations between Caltech, the PEF and the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), begin with a public lecture by a Caltech faculty member, who presents an aspect of his or her research with popular science appeal. The first event, held at Caltech on March 2, featured a lecture by Professor of Physics Ken Libbrecht, who discussed his research on the atmospheric conditions that determine how and why snowflakes form the shapes that they do.
Afterward, volunteers provide lab demonstrations related to the presentation that can help the teachers translate the researcher's science into practical K-12 learning activities for the classroom. At the snowflake event, volunteers demonstrated how to make snowflakes using everyday items such as Styrofoam cups, soda bottles, and fishing line; how to fold snowflake origami; and how to build a cloud chamber for visualizing radioactive decay.
More than 90 K-12 teachers from 35 schools in Pasadena and the surrounding area, along with 37 volunteers from Caltech, Pasadena City College, the Armory Center for the Arts, and other institutions, attended the inaugural Community Science Event.
At the event, teachers have opportunities to interact, asking the faculty member and volunteers questions about the featured topic. The teachers then discuss their students' needs and available resources before breaking into teams to create grade-appropriate lessons.
CTLO program manager and event co-organizer James Maloney (MS '06), who has been organizing outreach activities at Caltech for more than 10 years observed the importance of teachers at all different grade levels being part of the event. "We can take the core ideas from the event, find the common thread, and branch out grade-specific lesson plans," Maloney says. "The teachers are literally creating this big interlinked knowledge base right then and there."
Su says this process of creating lessons falls within the recommendations of Common Core—a widely adopted set of standards for mathematics and language arts education in the U.S. "The Common Core places emphasis on 'the four Cs': communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. We've incorporated elements of all of those. We're bringing all of these teachers together to work on lessons, make interlinked content, and approach learning in a collaborative way using our technologies, activities, and resources," he says.
Because the Common Core also emphasizes the integration of science and math with the humanities and the arts, the Community Science Events will include visiting partners from the Huntington Library and the Armory Center for the Arts to add additional historical and cultural context for the presented science and to provide ideas for related activities.
Future events are still in the planning stages, but Su and Maloney hope to cover a variety of topics within earth and space science, life science, and physical science in 12 events over the next two years. The eventual goal is to use each event to touch on one of the 11 key areas outlined by the Next Generation Science Standards, which were developed by a consortium of 26 states, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Research Council.
The standards also focus on lessons that are relevant to real-world problems, and the event has a similar emphasis. "Caltech professors will be presenting results from their actual research, and volunteers will do related demonstrations that address real-world problems. Also, because the activities incorporate a lot of do-it-yourself technology, they emphasize the linkage between science and engineering," Su says.
In addition to helping teachers adapt to the new standards, the interactive ideas presented at the Community Science Events will also spur ideas for fun and creative new classroom content—a benefit that both teachers and students appreciate.
"It felt so fantastic to develop lessons for my classroom that authentically mimicked the way 'real scientists' worked, doing research," says Suzanne York, a teacher at Sierra Madre Elementary School who attended the event. The events allow "students the opportunity for some real scientific content, while I worked on more of the pedagogical end," she says.
The events also "allow teachers in PUSD to work with Caltech scientists and see the various new technologies that are being developed," says science teacher Seung Seo from Marshall Fundamental High School. "This kind of collaboration is very important to the future of science education, especially for public schools with limited funds," she adds.
"The new Common Core and NGSS standards can often mean big changes—and sometimes challenges—for teachers. Events such as ours provide a way to put all these revisions in the hands of the teachers while also allowing them to take advantage of community resources around them," Su says.
This year the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching has been awarded to Professor of English Kevin Gilmartin, who has taught at Caltech for the past 24 years.
Gilmartin was nominated for this prize by students in several different disciplines, who praise his enthusiasm and accessibility, his artful handling of classroom discussion and debate, and his patient tutoring in the fine art of writing. In teaching evaluations, students describe Gilmartin as "an eloquent lecturer" and a "supportive professor" whose "enthusiasm is contagious."
The Feynman Prize committee—tasked with honoring a professor "who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation" in teaching—was unanimous in its support of Gilmartin, describing him as "an example to the Institute of the possibilities for engagement, discovery, and growth through classroom teaching."
Gilmartin's classes are no steady trudge through lectures and essays. Rather, they are taught seminar-style with student presentations, classroom discussions, and field trips to the Huntington Library. Gilmartin notes that he is particularly interested in helping students understand the historical context in which works of literature are produced, a theme that dominates his scholarly work as well. For example, this semester in a course on the works of Jane Austen (English 127), students are dabbling in what Gilmartin calls "a fascinating print record" from the period, ranging from manuals of conduct for young women to instructional pamphlets on everything from dancing to gardening. "Through the wonders of digital media," says Gilmartin, "students can see things that they would have previously found only in a rare books reading room."
Gilmartin also has pioneered workshops with visiting poets brought to campus through support from the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Provost's Office. "There's something remarkable about teaching a course where many of the authors that we read are still alive and are writing in ways that students feel are contemporary," says Gilmartin, "but then to have one of the writers actually present on campus has been a revelation for me and my students."
One of the Caltech students who nominated Professor Gilmartin for the Feynman Prize declares that he "vivifies the 'human' in 'humanities.'" She notes that teaching English can be an uphill battle at Caltech: "Despite a massive torrent of degradation inflicted upon the humanities by this sea of science-loving skeptics, Professor Kevin Gilmartin kindles a fire within each of his students to love English."
Gilmartin's impact on individual students is profound. As a Caltech alumna noted in her nomination of Gilmartin, "I came to Caltech believing that I was at best a mediocre writer and because of that, approached humanities courses with only a cursory effort. However, week after week, Professor Gilmartin would email me back with thoughtful and encouraging responses to my weekly write-ups. Gradually, I noticed myself spending more and more time on the assigned writings and speaking up more during class because, for the first time, I felt as if my opinions mattered."
Gilmartin himself, though certainly pleased by the award, is keen to share the credit with his colleagues and with Caltech administrators who have supported humanities programs in the classroom and beyond, notably with the recent development of the Hixon Writing Center. "I was closely involved in recruiting Susanne Hall as the director of the Hixon Center, and she has supported my teaching in extraordinary ways through her peer tutoring program," he says. "One of my most rewarding recent experiences as a teacher has been to see a number of students from my freshman humanities courses go on to become peer tutors in the writing program themselves."
Alongside his regular teaching, Gilmartin serves as faculty advisor for the student literary and visual arts magazine, Totem. Another Caltech alumnus credits Gilmartin for making it possible for Totem"to host a documentary and feature film director to discuss elements of cinema, and a JPL scientist who uses the art form of origami to do mathematical modeling." Gilmartin recalls that when he was first asked to be the magazine's faculty advisor in 2002, "I didn't know what a faculty advisor was expected to do." He learned on the job, and notes that he has been glad to help student editors with funding issues and to act as the magazine's "institutional memory" as senior editors and writers graduate and new editors and writers come in.
These and other Caltech students "make teaching easy," Gilmartin says. "Our students are extraordinarily bright, interested, and engaged. It's true that I've had to find ways to meet them halfway, and that's been a positive learning process for me as well. When classroom circumstances are right, their willingness to be engaged, their enthusiasm, their interest in literature and in challenging themselves is in no way restricted to the sciences."
The Feynman Prize has been endowed through the generosity of Ione and Robert E. Paradise and an anonymous local couple. Some of the most recent winners of the Feynman Prize include Steven Frautschi, professor of theoretical physics, emeritus; Paul Asimow, professor of geology and geochemistry; and Morgan Kousser, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and Social Science.
Nominations for next year's Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching will be solicited in the fall. Further information about the prize can be found on the Provost's Office website.
