The 2019 WAPT Annual Meeting will be held at the Chula Vista Resort and Water Park.  Rooms will be $80 Friday night and $99 Saturday night.  This includes 2 beds and the resort fee!

See the schedule, registration/payment, lodging and talk/poster/workshop submission links (Also links on left).

Questions? Email your meeting hosts Erik Hendrickson and Matt Evans

Plenary Speaker – Friday night 7:00 pm following banquet

Games and Puzzles as Nonthreatening Gateways to Understand Science and Problem Solving

Kathy Harper
Senior Lecturer
Department of Engineering Education, The Ohio State University
Course Coordinator, Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors Robot Option

Richard Feynmann once compared performing physics research to watching a cosmic game of chess and trying to figure out the rules.  Similarly, there are parallels between how humans solve problems and how they approach puzzles.  This presentation will share a number of ways in which the metaphors of research with games and puzzles with problems have served as the basis for classroom activities.  These examples come from a wide variety of institutions and populations, including an elementary school science class, a high school physics course, a seminar for non-science majors at a two-year campus, an elective course for engineering majors at a large research university, and a workshop for a college sophomore mentoring program.  The intent of all of these activities is to help students build upon their experiences and observations in a non-scientific context to better understand (and often in the case of science-phobic students, to demystify) the scientific process.