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Invited talk to be presented at AAPT Summer National Meeting, Portland OR, July 2013.

Reinventing the introductory physics laboratories for future biologists

W. Losert, K. Moore, & J. Gianini

We have developed a set of laboratories and hands on activities to accompany a new interdisciplinary physics course that has been successfully developed and tested in a small class of students at the University of Maryland (UMD). With input from a large group of biologists, physicists, chemists, and education researchers at UMD, we have designed a course to be taken in the student's second year, with calculus, biology, and chemistry as prerequisites. This permits the laboratories to include significant content on physics at cellular scales, from chemical interactions to random motion and charge screening. We developed a lab that introduces the students to modern equipment such as microfluidics and microscopy and physics analysis tools in contexts relevant to biology, while keeping it simple enough to maintain the pedagogically valuable open ended laboratory structure.