This semester in my College Physics 2 course, I decided to mix things up and do something wacky. As discussed here:

I have a new exam/project idea for my class. I am having students write book sections and do peer review. https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdB8r2YV/ Let’s see what happens. Don’t worry physics purists, we will go back to regular exams for electric fields and charges.

So I did it! Here are some takeaways:

• Some of the figures and memes were just amazing! Check out the picture below from Sonia Solomon. It was my favorite.
• I used TurnItIn to curb people directly taking information from other sources. Students had access to their scores and could resubmit. It helped a lot!
• TurnItIn wasn’t enough though. The figures and pictures were directly taken from sites on the web/text books and not caught by the ap. I told the students they could hand draw pictures. Some did and it was amazing. Some just copy and pasted. I tried to give the students the benefit of the doubt when it wasn’t clear.
• Students really liked defining what all the variables were. They would just have lists. It wasn’t the best reading but it did help to understand what the equations were saying. Something text book authors might want to consider.
• Units continues to be a problem. I often found an example problem incorrect because of misused units.
• The peer review didn’t work so well because I didn’t do a good enough job of making sure everyone was reviewing the correct papers. So there confusion. It wasn’t the best. I am sorry to everyone involved.
• One of the students wrote a bio of herself and included this awesome picture of her – it was exactly the kind of picture that would be on the bio of an academic text. I actually broke out into open laughter on the train this morning. It was AWESOME!

So should I do this again and measure how much people learned? I don’t think so. Good idea, but I don’t think it is worth getting all the details right. I will ask the students for their opinion tomorrow and we will see. But I think this one should be shelved.