Michael Erickson has been a high school physics teacher for 12 years with the Calgary Board of Education. He has experience teaching in both online and traditional classrooms having spent time at three different high schools in suburban and inner-city locations. He also spent one year teaching in a suburb of Tianjin, China teaching physics as part of British Columbia's Offshore School program.

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During his tenure as a teacher he has observed that students often engage in peer-to-peer communication to help understand complex problems and concepts. However, most physics classes are small in size and do not provide the maximum potential for these peer-to-peer interactions.