Dr. Brian Jones, Colorado State University

When you land after a jump, the force in your ankle joint can be 12 times your weight—or even more. There are amphibians up to one foot long than don’t have lungs or gills—they exchange gases through their skin. Emperor penguins are so well insulated that the surface of their feathers can actually be colder than the temperature of the air and ice around them. These are topics that your students will find interesting, and understanding them requires some basic physics—forces and torques, diffusion, thermal radiation. Add some life to your class by treating examples that use real situations and real data, that allow students to use the simple models of physics to explain and explore the complexity of the world around them. In this session, we’ll discuss some ideas and some resources for doing just that.