This paper reports our experience in teaching first year university students' concepts of atomic and quantum physics and how their concepts changed during an introductory unit. The unit, which formed part of the first year physics course in the Department of Applied Physics at Curtin University of Technology, was based on a teaching unit developed at the Institute of Physics Education at Bremen University, Germany Another major difference between this and the traditional university approach to teaching this topic was that this unit was taught in a studio environment which supports student group work and interaction with computers. Introduction An innovative teaching unit developed at the Institute of Physics Education, University of Bremen, has been used to introduce year 13 German high school students to a quantum mechanics view of atomic structure. The idea of this new approach is to describe atoms from a quantum mechanics perspective from the very beginning instead of the traditional simpler and very limited, intermediate models.
Atomic physics is one of the most demanding topics to be taught to first year students.
The traditional introductory approach uses semi-classical descriptions such as the Bohr model in which the atom is likened to a planetary system with electrons orbiting the nucleus, analogous to planets orbitting the Sun. Structure and conception of the course To help the students learn this conceptually difficult topic in this new way, the course content, in particular the number of new terms and concepts, were greatly reduced compared with the traditional approach. Furthermore, new concepts are used throughout the course and are applied to a variety of problems. This enables students to model and solve differential equations on a graphical interface without detailed mathematical knowledge. This particular activity leads directly to students developing more appropriate mental pictures of 'states' of atoms.