Physics in Films: Student Performance and Expectations

During the past three years an ambitious, long term, pilot project, given the sobriquet ``Physics in Films,'' has been developed and implemented at UCF. The goal of the project is to revitalize the traditional general education Physical Science course typically included in the curricula of most colleges and universities. The transformation of the course introducing clips from popular Hollywood movies to illustrate principles of physical science has been very successful. It has been praised by the students and has attracted the attention of both scientific and public media. In this talk, we present data to support the claims that the course is more interesting for the students and that their performance is superior to that of students in the traditional course.