From the first day of semester, students model the activities, tools and scientific methods used by professional scientists. IT based courseware and resources were also made available for use by students in the Studio outside normal class hours for review, revision and consolidation purposes with an increasing amount of materials being also available via the Web.
Assessments involve a combination of conventional physics problems and computer based exercises.
This ongoing project has been evaluated from the perspective of both students and instructors with an immediate aim of increasing physics understanding, overall performance, interest, and class attendance, and to reduce the withdrawal rates. This presentation will describe some of the aspects of the evolution of this exciting project and its implication on other areas of university teaching and learning. One common mechanism used to increase productivity at the undergraduate level has been to increase student numbers in lecture, laboratory and tutorial classes. While this approach may reduce unit costs it fails to address a fundamental issue of the passivity of the learning that occurs in most such traditional classes. Of the students, who can be bothered to attend, fewer still spend their time engaging with the content while the instructors seem to spend all their time 'doing'.