Physics Education
Much recent work in physics education research has focused on ontological metaphors for energy, particularly the substance ontology and its pedagogical affordances. The concept of negative energy problematizes the substance ontology for…
The Australian National Curriculum promotes Indigenous culture in school education programs. To foster a broader appreciation of cultural astronomy, to utilise the unique astronomical heritage of the site, and to develop an educational…
The main goal of a scientific workshop is to bring together experts in a specific field or related fields to collaborate, to discuss, and to creatively make progress in a particular area. The organizational aspects of such a meeting play a…
In an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course that leverages authentic biological examples, student ideas about entropy as "disorder" or "chaos" come into contact with their ideas about the spontaneous formation of organized…
Energy is a complex idea that cuts across scientific disciplines. For life science students, an approach to energy that incorporates chemical bonds and chemical reactions is better equipped to meet the needs of life sciences students than a…
Louis deBroglie's connection between momentum and spatial-frequency vectors is perhaps most viscerally-experienced via the real-time access that electron-diffraction provides to transverse slices of a nano-crystal's reciprocal-lattice. The…
Probability Theory and Statistics are two of the most useful mathematical fields, and also two of the most difficult to learn. In other science fields, as Physics, experimentation is an useful tool to develop students intuition, but the…
The Research Unit in Bioinformatics at Rhodes University (RUBi), South Africa offers a Masters of Science in Bioinformatics. Growing demand for Bioinformatics qualifications results in applications from across Africa. Courses aim to bridge…
Bachelor physics lectures on particle physics and astrophysics were complemented by exercises related to data analysis and data interpretation at the RWTH Aachen University recently. The students performed these exercises using the internet…
We review the literature on the gender gap on concept inventories in physics. Across studies of the most commonly used mechanics concept inventories, the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE), mens…
In this paper we show how to obtain the Inverse-square law of the distance to the light intensity emitted from a small source in a simple, fast and with good precision way. With the aid of two smartphones, free apps and a ruler, one is able…
We examine the process through which computational thinking develops in a perspectival fashion as two middle school students collaborate with each other in order to develop computational models of two graphs of motion. We present an…
Recently, Harrington et al.\ (2013) presented an outreach effort to introduce school students to network science and explain why researchers who study networks should be involved in such outreach activities. Based on the modules they…
Descreve-se neste trabalho uma proposta de curr\'iculo interdisciplinar para a forma\c{c}\~ao de professores de ci\^encias da natureza. O curso permite a obten\c{c}\~ao de quatro diplomas: professor de ci\^encias para o ensino fundamental…
For many students, college physics courses have little or even negative impact on their beliefs about the connection between physics and the everyday world. One way to help students see this connection is to incorporate analysis of science…
The physics of walking is explored, using a toy as a concrete example and a 'toy' model applied to it. Besides the Newton's second law, the problem is also discussed from the thermodynamical perspective. Once the steady state (constant…
In a first course to classical mechanics elementary physical processes like elastic two-body collisions, the mass-spring model, or the gravitational two-body problem are discussed in detail. The continuation to many-body systems, however,…
Cognitive conflict is well recognized as an important factor in conceptual change and is widely used in developing inquiry-based curricula. However, cognitive conflict can also contribute to student anxiety during learning, which can have…
Despite intense efforts, contemporary educational systems are not enabling individuals to function optimally in modern society. The main reason is that reformers are trying to improve systems that are not designed to take advantage of the…
We investigate how the integration of visual agent-based programming and computationally augmented physical structures can support curricular integration across STEM domains for elementary grade students. We introduce ViMAP-Tangible, a…