New Course Profile: PHYS 333 – Energy and Climate

PHYS 333: Energy and Climate is a new online distance education course that explores the fundamental physics behind the global issues of energy and climate change. The course focuses on the application of physics to our lives, rather than just the concepts, and aims to help students learn how to analyze and think through real world problems from an informed, scientific perspective.

PHYS 333 is designed to be hands-on and interactive, and will make extensive use of group discussions in online forums. Students will work together to explore big questions, such as how can we provide power for a world of nine billion people by 2050. To discuss these questions, they will start with a number of more immediately manageable questions like:

• Is it better to commute by bike or car? (It’s not as simple as you might think!)
• Does recycling an aluminum can reduce the amount of energy used?
• How much energy does an average person use in a day?

Students will also get the opportunity to use digital measuring instruments out in the real world, e.g. a tachometer, anemometer, weigh scale, and infrared thermometer. These useful instruments can be purchased from $10-$18 each (the textbook for the course is freely available online). Some of the experiments students will perform include:

• Analyzing the energy efficiency of different ways of heating water in a home
• Measuring the efficiency of a household fan to understand wind turbines
• Measuring glide slope and speed of a balsa wood glider to determine the energy required to get a 747 jet across an ocean
• Measuring the power requirements of a bicycle to understand the cost of hauling freight

Students will come away from the course with an enhanced understanding of how energy is used in the world around us and how its use impacts the environment. Students will learn how to evaluate human activities in terms of energy and waste, and to present arguments using numbers rather than adjectives. The course is ideal for students majoring in Science, and General Science students. For a more detailed description of the course, please visit the course webpage.

This article was published in the September 2012 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.