ABSTRACT
The roots of the Studio Course model at Rensselaer can be found in the research in physics education and the calculus reform movement of the 1980s. Instructors became convinced that there had to be a better way to teach than the various lecture models that dominated the education systems, especially at the large universities. The pressures of advances in computing, communication, and cognitive science both mandated change and enabled it. Computing tools were advancing such that the power was doubling every 18 months, but little had been done to use that power in education. New forms of communication through networks, e-mail, and the World Wide Web were revolutionizing communication and could do the same for education. Instructors were learning more and more about how students learn, obstacles to learning, and techniques to improve learning from the research in the cognitive sciences, particularly as it applied to physics teaching.
New learning environments needed to be designed to allow students to become far more engaged with one another, with the instructor, and with newly created technology-based materials. In the 1980s, my colleagues and I were involved in reanalyzing the introductory physics curriculum to determine how it needed to change to prepare students for the information world. In the M.U.P.P.E.T. project, Redish and I called for an entirely new, technology-based approach to physics (MacDonald, Redish, & Wilson, 1988). As we developed the M.U.P.P.E.T. curriculum, we became more and more familiar with the research in physics education and its implications for course design. At the same time, an active community was becoming interested in the application of technology to physics education and in the developing understanding of student learning. Some worked on the creation of microcomputer-based laboratories, some on video disks and digital video, others were interested in physics simulations, and still others focused on modeling and numerical approaches to problem solving.
