Whiteboard prompts are designed to increase student participation during lectures, improve problem solving abilities, show different points of view on a question, and gauge student understanding of course content. The students are given a small white board and marker at the beginning of each class where they answer questions posed to them throughout the class. Many of the questions are open-ended and/or vague in order to engage the students in critical thinking.

These activites are inquiry based and peer-lead learning activities. They involve experiments or worksheet activities designed for groups of three working on large whiteboards. The activities are linked with the lecture before and/or after the activity and once again contain minimal instructions. Many of the connections are seen through the activity or emphasized during the wrap-up lecture.

Maple is a good tool to analyze and visualize a lot of the physics concepts covered in the course. Numerical simulations are used to (approximately) solve dynamical systems that cannot be solved analytically, and to provide graphical and visual displays of the interdependence of dynamical variables. Maple helps students see what is going on in the system and is an excellent tool for building intuition, testing predictions, and verifying solutions to problems.

The program's emphasis on student-centered learning throughout PH221, as well as its aim to simulate authentic research collaborations, intitiated our decision to align assessment methods with established learning outcomes. In order to do this, each exam was broken into two parts: 1) an individual exam during class, and 2) an evening group exam. The use of individual and group examinations allowed us to incorporate how problem solving is carried out by physicists in research groups without discounting personal accountability for required materials.

The rubric was designed to outline key components of physics problem solving and was titled generically Physics Problem Solving Rubric so students could use the established criteria to guide them on both homework and exam preparation. In addition, it gives students a guideline for homework grading and allows the opportunity for some students to self-grade and improve their home-work and problem outline technique.

Concept-maps allowed students to explore and develop a deeper understanding of underlying connections between principles, adding cohesion to seemingly individual units of study. In addition, concept-maps provided valuable insight into how students process and assemble physics principles in their own minds. More importantly, we could assess where connections weren't being made and address student misconceptions as they occurred.

"Wind Sprints" is a classroom trigger phrase that prepares students for a designated series of rapid strategic exercises. These exercises are designed to assist students with improving their problem-solving skills in a semi-simulated test environment. The students use their small whiteboards to set up the different steps of the problem (given a few minutes) and get a chance to discuss the pros & cons of each approach.

Students were given the option to take a half-hour pre-test consisting of one problem representative of each chapter upon its completion in lectures. All of the material covered in the course was subsequently addressed in the standard two midterms and final exam format. Students received the better of the two scores, between the pre-test and respective standard exam questions, from each chapter. The use of multiple testing opportunities allowed students to be tested on material at the initial time of exposure, as well as later in the term.