Physics Meets Art in the General Education Core

Abstract

This article describes a general education course offering, Physics and the Arts. During the development of this course, physics and arts faculty collaborated closely. We cover the usual physics phenomena for such a course—light, color, and sound—in addition to gravity, equilibrium, and spacetime. Goals of the course are to increase students’ engagement with physics and to develop students’ ability to conduct scientific investigations. After the first offering of the course, instructors added two objectives: to involve artistic works regularly and to reduce math anxiety among this group of nonscience students. The laboratory activities follow a guided inquiry style and are listed in the article. The culminating lab activity requires that students create an artistic work of their own design, and the goal of the piece is to present a physics phenomenon or idea. Assignments and assessments related to the culminating lab activity are described in detail. The course increases scientific engagement of our students.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marta L. Dark

Marta L. Dark ([email protected]) is an associate professor, Department of Physics at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Derrick J. Hylton

Derrick J. Hylton is an associate professor and founder of the physics program, Department of Physics at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.