I taught in WPI's Frontiers program for 24 years, from 1994-2018, stopping the year Covid temporarily shut down the program. Frontiers is a two week summer program that WPI organizes for bright high school students who are interested in studying one of the STEM disciplines in college. I had a total
of about twenty students coming from all over the US and a few other countries for the later years in which I taught it.
Quite a few of the students went on to major in a STEM field at WPI and many others did the same elsewhere. It was an exhilerating
and rewarding experience for me, if a bit exhausting, because we always managed to do so much in just two weeks: lectures, lab and project activities,
visits to museums and research labs and many other things besides. One of the things I did back then, which would never be allowed now,
was to rent out a big van from WPI and drive all my students over to the Museum of Science in Boston for a day visit. I have tons of
pictures documenting everything we did, letters from some of the students and many, many good memories. However my memorablia are disorganized
and some are in places I have lost track of. At least two of my students went on to become high school teachers of physics and two that I know of
later got Ph.D degrees.
There are two spinoffs that occurred as a result of my involvement in Frontiers. The first was that I became interested in promoting
math and science among high school students and their teachers. This led me to write some pedagogically oriented articles over the years
in which I tried to interest this audience in topics they might not normally encounter in the course in their studies. These forays helped me learn something about teaching and how to engage my audience (or at least they gave me that illusion), and that is why I value them. I list some of the
articles I wrote below (interestingly, they more heavily weighted towards math than physics, the subject I taught in Frontiers).
The other spinoff was the large number of computer programs I wrote in GW and QBasic on the first laptops that came out and that were generously
gifted to the faculty by WPI. I shared these programs with my students over the years and refined and added to them as time went on. The students
seemed to like some of them and I thought that instead of letting them die a quiet death, I ought to rescue and update a few of them with the help of our computer savvy students and make them available to a new generation of students. Some IQP teams have worked with me over the years to transform this vision into a reality, and you can see the results of their efforts at SCIENCE OUTREACH. I realize that a lot of material on these topics is available on the web, if only one can hunt it down. I don't claim that my efforts are superior to what may out there, this is just my way of adding to public awareness based on material that I already have in my possession. If you are an undergraduate student at WPI who has an interest in doing an IQP in this area, get in touch with me and we can see if there is a project that might interest you.
Finally, here are some of the pedagogical articles I have written.
What fraction of a soccer ball is covered with pentagons? (a math problem posed by a soccer ball)
Cutting a pizza into equal parts by cuts parallel to a diameter
(an activity for Pi day?)
A million sonnets
(poetry multiplied by math)
The Hypercubical Dance -- a solution to Abbott's problem in Flatland? (math set to dance)
The N-bug problem (contrasting Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries)
Sunsets, tall buildings
and the Earth's radius (standing on the shoulders of Eratosthenes)
The physics of the Space Elevator (building a tower to heaven)
How spherical are the Archimedean solids and their duals? (can you guess which is the roundest?)
Variations on a Sangaku problem invoving kissing spheres (Japanese temple geometry)
Resistor Networks based on Symmetrical
Polytopes (calculating node-to-node resistances in symmetrical networks)