Investigations of student experiences in Physics and the Brain, a new interdisciplinary course

We have created a one semester undergraduate course, Physics and the Brain (PATB), which seamlessly integrates foundational physics and neuroscience. The course tells the story of the entire auditory system from sound wave input to signal processing in the biological neural network. Using the lens of Community of Practice theory, we investigated the experiences of students in PATB. Specifically we explored research questions pertaining to skill adaptation and acquisition in this interdisciplinary environment, and student perceptions of the effectiveness of the integration of physics and neuroscience content. Here we present the design and execution of PATB, and discuss the initial findings we have for the research questions outlined above.