Physics Education
Plutarchus, circa 100 AD, in his early book on "astrophysics" --in which he exposed, in a sense, a general theory of gravitation-- wrote the noticeable passage: <<The Moon gets the guarantee of not falling down just from its motion and from…
I discuss an apparently simple ballistics problem: the time it takes an object to fall a small vertical distance near the surface of the Earth. It turns out to be not so simple; I spend a great deal of time on the quantitative assessment of…
We measured the correlation of the times between successive flaps of a flag for a variety of wind speeds and found no evidence of low dimensional chaotic behavior in the return maps of these times. We instead observed what is best modeled…
In 2004, Tohoku University created a new introductory science experimental course for freshmen. The course is a compulsory subject for students in all natural science fields. The course is not designed for a professional education, but as a…
The paper discusses an application of the field effected transistor (FET) as a voltage controlled resistance which can be done in under-graduate labs either as a routine experiment or as a project.
A very simple Data acquisition card was developed in our under-graduate class for interfacing with the parallel port of a standard computer. It was developed with the intention to enable students to do various physics experiments with the…
Visualizations that adopt a first-person point of view allow observation and, in the case of interactive simulations, experimentation with relativistic scenes. This paper gives examples of three types of first-person visualizations:…
The objective of this paper is to describe a development of an innovative approach to enable students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to apply the concepts learned in physics and mathematics to engineering…
An invited plenary given at the founding meeting of the Southern African Association for Research in Mathematics and Science Education in 1992.
Students are often mystified by the reasoning that leads from the postulates of special relativity to the requirement of covariance. This is partly due to the lack of transparency resulting from the failure to clearly separate the roles the…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
We assert that models of cognitive structure all have the same basic features. These basic features, independent of the model, have important implications for instruction and assessment. We describe the basic features of models of cognitive…
The wireless network technology WiFi finds more and more applications in the industrial field as for the exchange of information between the people or the equipment. It has the advantage of allowing a great flexibility of the network but…
Single particle models are sufficient for many topics in introductory physics courses, but become misleading when applied to situations involving changes in internal energy. This paper merges two parallel attempts to reform the teaching of…
In teaching the physical sciences, a significant challenge lies in the student's tendency to consider the scientific world and the "real" world as separate. For example, Newton's 1st Law of Motion states that an object in motion remains in…
We analyze a simple problem in elasticity: the \emph{initial} motion of an elastic bar that after being hanged from an end is suddenly released. In a second problem a point mass is attached on the top of the bar. The analytical solutions…
1. Connection between integration and differentiation/ Gauss theorem. Coordinate-free definitions: gradient, divergence, curl. Stokes theorem. 2. Elements of continuum mechanics/ Continuity equation. Stress tensor. Euler equation.…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
We obtain the Casimir effect for the massless scalar field in one dimension based on the analogy between the quantum field and the continuum limit of an infinite set of coupled harmonical oscillators.
We address the question "How do students make sense of Physics from the point of view of constituting physics knowledge?". A phenomenographic study is described as a result of which we present six qualitatively different ways in which…