Category: education

AFM in education



We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.


Galileo Galilei

I am thinking of how the AFMWorkshop AFM could assist in Physics education. As I reflect on my five years of teaching first year physics, any new topic must support the instruction of basic classical physics. For many students this is a new experience. Some students have seen science and math as a string of facts and formulae to be memorized. It is a new concept that science is a process by which facts are questioned and that math (and now computational thinking) are tools for that exploration. Science is about questions.

The goal, then, is to explore how this AFM can assist in the explanation of classical physics topics. How can it make the explanations of oscillations and of optics more interesting? How does electronics help in the exploration of classical phenomena? The AFM operates at the boundary of classical and atomic physics; how does that help the segue from classical to modern physics?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” – Werner Heisenberg