Guest Speaker: Prof. Chris Orban

Revolutionizing introductory STEM courses with 21st century learning

This talk will focus on how two advancements -- smartphone-based Virtual Reality and browser-based coding activites -- can be used to develop innovative new approaches for teaching introductory STEM courses that can be deployed on a large scale. In particular I will talk about the BuckeyeVR project (http://buckeyevr.osu.edu) which is being used in select physics, math and engineering courses at OSU. I will also discuss the STEMcoding project which is an OSU-led effort to integrate simple, standards-aligned, browser-based coding activities into high school and early college STEM courses like physics, physical science and math. By releasing activities on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/c/STEMcoding) and hourofcode.com, the STEMcoding project aims to compensate for a lack of attention to these areas from national coding initiatives. Both the BuckeyeVR and STEMcoding projects have included a serious educational research component that I will describe. Finally, I will provide my perspective on CS education in Ohio as a member of the Ohio Department of Education CS standards committee.

Bio: Chris Orban is an assistant professor of physics at Ohio State Marion. He collaborates closely with the Physics Education Research group in the physics department at OSU and he has served on both the science standards committee and the newly-formed computer science standards committee with the Ohio Department of Education. His background is in computational physics and high performance computing.

Host: Julia Armstrong