About me

Hi! I'm Jason Goodman. I am an associate professor of physics and environmental science at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Professionally, I teach courses in introductory physics, climate change, fluid dynamics, and electricity and magnetism. My research focuses on the fluid dynamics of icy worlds: I have performed computer simulations of the flow of Earth's oceans and ice during the "Snowball Earth" period in Earth's history, when it might have been completely ice-covered. I have also studied ice and ocean dynamics for Jupiter's icy moon Europa, as well as other icy worlds in our solar system.

I grew up in Hawaii, which got me started in studying Earth's oceans, and did my undergraduate at Carleton College in Minnesota, which got me interested in studying ice-covered hell planets. I live in Southern Massachusetts with my wife and four cats. My hobbies include science fiction reading, roleplaying games, making things, and a serious addiction to video games.

Fab Experience

I've been tinkering with electronics and making things since I was very young, and at Wheaton I've been one of the faculty organizers and leaders for Wheaton's Fab Lab. I have a bunch of experience with many -- but not all -- of the tasks taught in Fab Academy: in fact, I worked as a secondary instructor for the class in 2021 and 2022. My goals in taking this class are to gain the qualifications with the Fab Foundation so I can officially teach it in the future, to see the class from the student's perspective so I can improve my teaching skills, and to fill out some missing skills and stretch my knowledge into new domains. For example, I have done some of the electronics fabrication parts of Fab Academy, but I haven't done moldmaking and casting, web design, etc. I've done 3-d design in Autodesk Fusion 360 before, but I'm going to be trying Solidworks for the class. And I'm going to challenge myself to do some really difficult electronics design tasks. I hope to contribute to making Fab Academy better in the future, both here at Wheaton and around the world.

Previous Projects

This is a soccer ball containing an accelerometer, an Adafruit Trinket microcontroller board, and an array of Neopixels. The lights change color so they're always green on the bottom and yellow on top no matter how you orient the ball. The lights turn blue when the ball is in free-fall, and red when it experiences high acceleration.

This is a topographic map of the town in Hawaii where I grew up, milled from plywood using a 3-axis CNC machine. I then put the part into a laser cutter and engraved the road network. I had fewer problems with focusing the laser beam on the uneven surface than I expected!

These are a set of silver beads that I designed as jewelry for my wife. I did the 3-d design and then had them manufactured in silver by i.materialise.com, an online printing service. I'm hoping to learn how to do metal casting projects like this on my own!