Five years ago when I was asked to develop a module on quantum physics for a new course,1 I decided to see if students could reproduce some of the reasoning that won Einstein his Nobel Prize. The students were in the third semester of a four-semester sequence emphasizing guided discovery, graphical analysis, and scientific communication. Most had weak high school physics backgrounds and had shown little evidence of remembering the concepts they had been exposed to at that level. The students were accustomed to working in groups of three to five for two-hour in-class workshops. They had not studied concepts related to light, optics, or electromagnetism in the course to that point. Thus, I gave them a workshop that presented a description of the photoelectric effect experiment at a schematic level (light of various colors hits a metal, electrons come off, the number of electrons and the kinetic energy per electron are measured), and a data table consisting of the qualitative color of the incident light, the intensity of the light, the number of electrons, and the kinetic energy per electron. The workshop asked them to graph the data in whatever way they felt appropriate, and to suggest a model of light that could explain the results.

1.
For further discussion of the techniques used in this course, see
S.
Calvin
, “
A lesson in curve fitting
,”
Phys. Teach.
37
,
340
341
(Sept.
1999
);
P.
Mills
,
W. V.
Sweeney
,
S.
DeMeo
,
R.
Marino
, and
S.
Clarkson
, “
Using poster sessions as an alternative to written examinations—The poster exam
,”
J. Chem. Educ.
77
,
1158
1161
(Sept.
2000
);
P.
Mills
,
W. V.
Sweeney
,
W.
Cieniewicz
, “
Experiencing and visualizing the first law of thermodynamics: An in-class workshop
,”
J. Chem. Educ.
78
,
1360
1361
(Oct.
2001
).
2.
Suppose a bunch of kids are playing baseball in the street. Is it likely they will break a window? Is it likely they will knock a hole in a brick wall? If they hit more baseballs, will they break more windows? Now will they knock a hole in a brick wall? How about if they use Ping-Pong balls instead of baseballs?
3.
“As far as I can see our ideas are not contrary to [the] observations on the…effect. If each [chunk] of light were to give its energy to the electrons independently of all the others then the [kinetic energy per electron] of the [electrons] produced will be independent of the intensity of the exciting radiation; on the other hand the number of electrons leaving the body under equal conditions will be directly proportional to the intensity of the incident radiation.” Quote taken from M.H. Shamos, Great Experiments in Physics (Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, New York, 1959), p. 236.
4.
A.
Einstein
, “
Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt
,”
Annalen der Physik
17
,
132
144
(
1905
).
5.
A readily available translation and commentary is J. Stachel, Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998), pp. 165–198.
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