Physics Education
EBI is a further education establishment which provides education in applied industrial biology at level of MSc engineering degree. Fluid mechanics at EBI was considered by students as difficult who seemed somewhat unmotivated. In order to…
The past 10-15 years have seen numerous calls for curricular reform in undergraduate biology education, most of which focus on changes to curriculum or pedagogy. Data collected from students in a large introductory undergraduate biology…
The article describes alternative concepts in understanding of sound observed among students at the elementary, high school and college level. The research confirmed some previously found alternative concepts and pointed to several others.…
A brief account of some recent controversies about the teaching and learning of physics is presented. A shorter version of this outcome was accepted by The Physics Teacher, but publication is still pending.
Education, science, in fact the whole society, extensively use images. Between us and the world are the visual displays. Screens, small and large, individual or not, are everywhere. Images are increasingly the 2D substrate of our virtual…
This paper shows how to run some experiments of physics, using a virtual laboratory. Such a laboratory is a website, equipped with objects to be measured and measuring instruments, simulated by means of Java Applets. Here we discuss in…
We study the effect of radiation damping on the classical scattering of charged particles. Using a perturbation method based on the Runge-Lenz vector, we calculate radiative corrections to the Rutherford cross section, and the corresponding…
At the beginning of academic year 2007-08, staff in the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Glasgow started to implement a number of substantial changes to the first year physics class. The main aims were to improve the…
The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) has opened an Evening Tutoring Center to provide after-hours tutoring every evening before class days. The center focuses on first and second year courses in challenging quantitative disciplines:…
In this paper I address the difference between knowledge-inquiry and wisdom-inquiry (concepts introduced by N. Maxwell) in nuclear physics education, specifically in senior-level textbooks for first-degree physics students. Following on…
Mathieu Bouville's "Why is cheating wrong?" (Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(1), 67-76, 2010) misses the mark by failing to consider the longer term consequences of cheating on student character development and longer term societal…
International research work for young people is common in physics. However, work experience and career plan of female workers in physics are little studied. We explore them by interviewing three international female workers in physics.
University courses in conceptual physics and astronomy typically serve as the terminal science experience for non-science majors. Significant work has gone into developing research-verified pedagogical methods for the algebra- and…
Springs are used for a wide range of applications in physics and engineering. Possibly, one of its most common uses is to study the nature of restoring forces in oscillatory systems. While experiments that verify the Hooke's law using…
These test problems were used by the author as weekly control works for the first year physics students at Novosibirsk State University in 2005. Solutions of the problems are also given. The problems were taken from or inspired by the…
The measure of the characteristics of a transistor is an important step in an introductory electronics course. We propose to use a digital oscilloscope with a USB connection to perform a measurement of the characteristic curves with no…
Density Functional Theory (DFT) is one of the most widely used methods for "ab initio" calculations of the structure of atoms, molecules, crystals, surfaces, and their interactions. Unfortunately, the customary introduction to DFT is often…
Physics curricula across the US fail to prepare students adequately to solve problems, especially novel problems. A new curriculum, Matter and Interactions (M&I), was designed to improve student learning by organizing concepts around…
A new simplified approach for teaching electromagnetism is presented using the formalism of geometric algebra (GA) which does not require vector calculus or tensor index notation, thus producing a much more accessible presentation for…
From 2001 to 2007, COSMOS provided a teaching and outreach venue for the Center for Adaptive Optics Professional Development Program (CfAO PDP). COSMOS is a four-week residential mathematics and science summer program for high-school…