Physics Education
Thought experiments are where logical reasoning meets storytelling, catalysing progress in quantum science and technology. Schr\"odinger's famous cat brought quantum science to the public consciousness, while Deutsch's thought experiment to…
Quantum physics modeling is technically complex and often non-descriptive. This article presents some approaches how quantum physical ideas can be represented by haptic models. For this purpose, models made from 3D printers, models made…
With the recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and their widespread availability through open source models and/or low-cost APIs, several exciting products and applications are emerging, many of which are in the field of STEM…
Quantum theory is often regarded as challenging to learn and teach, with advanced mathematical prerequisites ranging from complex numbers and probability theory to matrix multiplication, vector space algebra and symbolic manipulation within…
Nobel laureate Wolfgang Paul showed, back in the 1950s, that charged particles can be trapped using alternating electric fields. This technique is commonly referred to as Paul traps or radiofrequency traps (RF-traps) and is used in various…
This study investigates the influence of ChatGPT, an AI-based language model, on student performance in a physics course. We conducted an experimental analysis with two cohorts of students in a second-semester engineering physics course.…
Although researchers have extensively studied student conceptions of radioactivity, the conceptions held by pre-service teachers on this subject are largely absent from the literature. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of…
This paper reports the first study on the ability of Year 3 students (ages 7 to 8) to conceptualize Einsteinian concepts. This paper reports that children aged 7-8 are not too young to learn key Einsteinian concepts, and the benefits of…
Statistical physics courses typically employ abstract language that describes objects too small to be seen, making the topic challenging for students to understand. In this work, we introduce a simple experiment that allows conceptualizing…
The use of augmented reality (AR) allows for the integration of digital information onto our perception of the physical world. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of previously published literature on the implementation of…
Numbers, both very large and very small, are crucially important for understanding the modern world. This paper assesses trials of a mathematics and physics module called Powers of the Universe in which arithmetic with extreme numbers…
Problem solving is an integral part of any physics curriculum, and most physics instructors would likely agree that the associated learner competencies are best assessed by considering the solution path: not only the final solution matters,…
Collaborative learning with peers can lead to students learning from each other and solving physics problems correctly not only in situations in which one student knows how to solve the problems but also when none of the students can solve…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS) is a multiple-choice survey that contains conceptual problems involving a variety of energy and momentum concepts covered in a typical introductory physics course for science and engineering…
In this paper, we discuss four errors introductory physics students make when attempting to add two inverse-square law vectors. We observe multiple instances in which students 1) add vectors as if they were scalars, 2) project the $r$ (or…
We present the Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope (CHART), a project that provides hands-on radio instrumentation and design experience to undergraduates while bringing accessible radio astronomy experiments to high school students…
Screen-reader software enables blind users to access large segments of electronic content, particularly if accessibility standards are followed. Unfortunately, this is not true for much of the content written in physics, mathematics, and…
There has been a growing realisation that school science curricula do not adequately reflect the revolutionary changes in our scientific understanding of the 20th century. This discrepancy between current school education and our modern…
Physics lab courses permanently undergo transformations, in recent times especially to adapt to the emergence of new digital technologies and the Covid-19 pandemic in which digital technologies facilitated distance learning. Since these…