Related papers: Second Life Physics: Virtual, real, or surreal?
Studying quantum physics in upper secondary school is now a standard practice (Stadermann et al., 2019). But given the context of science education, with low recruitment numbers in higher education and poor attitudes towards science, it…
Training students in basic concepts of physics, such as the ones related to mass, volume, or density, is much more complicated than just stating the underlying definitions and laws. One of the reasons for this is that most students have…
The physics laboratory-works creating and operating computer simulations experience is described. A significant amount of laboratory works can be classified as a "black box". The studied physical phenomenon is hidden from direct…
The quantum world is fascinating. It presents a description of nature that defies our most rooted concepts about what reality is. For example, quantum objects possess \lq\lq spooky\rq\rq\ properties that allow them to be in multiple places…
Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…
Physics education research has probed for the relevance of physics in students' everyday lives. Attitudinal and epistemological surveys have asked students if they think of or use physics in their daily lives. We have previously documented…
Quantum weirdness has been in the news recently, thanks to an ingenious new experiment by a team led by Roland Hanson, at the Delft University of Technology. Much of the coverage presents the experiment as good (even conclusive) news for…
The Schr\"odinger's wave function can naturally be realized as an 'instantaneous resonant spatial mode' in which quantum particle moves and hence the Born's rule is derived after identifying its origin. This realization facilitates the…
A priority of physics instruction is to help students make the connection between the formulae they think they are required to memorize and the real world in which they interact every day. If you ask students to describe a situation in real…
Parallel lives is a model which provides an interpretation of quantum theory that is both local and realistic. This model assumes that all quantum fields are composed of point beings called "lives". Lives interact locally and have a memory…
We report on a study of the effects of laboratory activities that model fictitious laws of physics in a virtual reality environment on (1) students' epistemology about the role of experimental physics in class and in the world; (2)…
The nature of the existence, revealed through Human cognitive system, has been evolving since the development of the languages. Part of such revelations were the geometrical forms and the numbers, whose beauty and order, wondrous and…
This paper identifies a new phenomenon: when users interact with simulated objects in a virtual environment where the user is much smaller than usual, there is a mismatch between the object physics that they expect and the object physics…
The teaching of abstract physics concepts can be enhanced by incorporating visual and haptic sensory modalities in the classroom, using the correct perspectives. We have developed virtual reality simulations to assist students in learning…
Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…
The reform of the upper secondary school in Italy has recently introduced physics in the curricula of professional schools, in realities where it was previously absent. Many teachers, often with a temporary position, are obliged to teaching…
This paper proposes the concept of "live-action virtual reality games" as a new genre of digital games based on an innovative combination of live-action, mixed-reality, context-awareness, and interaction paradigms that comprise tangible…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a learning paradigm in which the agent learns from its environment through trial and error. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms represent the agent's policies using neural networks, making their…
Physics Education Research (PER) studies have demonstrated that undergraduate students struggle with fundamental principles from Electromagnetism (EM) and Special Relativity (SR). However, few studies have approached the intersection of the…
We introduce latent intuitive physics, a transfer learning framework for physics simulation that can infer hidden properties of fluids from a single 3D video and simulate the observed fluid in novel scenes. Our key insight is to use latent…