Welcome

Projects & Practices in Physics (P³) is an introductory calculus-based physics course redesigned to engage students through scientific practice. Instead of traditional lectures, students work in groups on modeling projects, tackling physics problems with both analytical methods and computational tools like VPython, while instructors facilitate discussion and debate rather than deliver material from the front of the room.

This site collects the P³ course notes, organized by week, and the worked examples referenced throughout them, migrated from the original MSU PERL wiki.

Course materials were developed by Michigan State University’s Physics Education Research Lab and Department of Physics and Astronomy, drawing on physics education research and instructor feedback, with inspiration from colleagues. Content is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Acknowledgements

The development of these materials was partially inspired by the work of our colleagues Ruth Chabay, Bruce Sherwood, Michael Dubson, Brian Bowe, Robert Howard, Vince Kuo, and Pat Kohl. This work has been supported by MSU’s CREATE for STEM Institute.

Issues?

If you find typos, broken links, missing images, or other things to report, please send us an email.