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This article has been written for an educational magazine whose target audience consists of students and teachers of mathematics in universities, colleges and schools. It concerns a notion of duality between rectangles. A proof is given…
Teachers of the visually impaired (TVIs) regularly present tactile materials (tactile graphics, 3D models, and real objects) to students with vision impairments. Researchers have been increasingly interested in designing tools to support…
Building blocks and tiles are an excellent way of learning about geometry and mathematics in general. There are several versions of tiles that are either snapped together or connected with magnets that can be used to introduce topics like…
Resulting from cross-disciplinary dialogue between physicists, computer scientists, educationalists, and industrial end users, we propose the concept of quantum literacy as one means of addressing the transdisciplinary nature of the complex…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
Quantum Computing (QC) is often challenging for beginners due to its abstract concepts and mathematical foundations. This paper explores the use of gamification to support the learning of introductory QC concepts. To investigate this,…
Quaternions, discovered by Sir William Rowan Hamilton in the 19th century, are a significant extension of complex numbers and a profound tool for understanding three-dimensional rotations. This work explores the quaternion's history,…
Teaching Unix to new students is a common tasks in many higher schools. This paper presents an approach to such course where the students progress autonomously with the help of the teacher. The traditional textbook is complemented with a…
Mathematical objects are generally abstract and not very approachable. Illustrations and interactive visualizations help both students and professionals to comprehend mathematical material and to work with it. This approach lends itself…
A contemporary physicist would be hard put to agree entirely with the author of a 1959 textbook on quantum mechanics, who wrote: "A second simple, one-dimensional system, somewhat divorced from reality but illustrative of the principles of…
The labyrinth game is a simple yet challenging platform, not only for humans but also for control algorithms and systems. The game is easy to understand but still very hard to master. From a system point of view, the ball behaviour is in…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
The game of table tennis is renowned for its extremely high spin rate, but most table tennis robots today struggle to handle balls with such rapid spin. To address this issue, we have contributed a series of methods, including: 1.…
Gamification and Serious Games are progressively being used over a host of fields, particularly to support education. Such games provide a new way to engage students with content and can complement more traditional approaches to learning.…
In this work we propose a novel task framework under which a variety of physical reasoning puzzles can be constructed using very simple rules. Under sparse reward settings, most of these tasks can be very challenging for a reinforcement…
We study a new reconfiguration problem inspired by classic mechanical puzzles: a colored token is placed on each vertex of a given graph; we are also given a set of distinguished cycles on the graph. We are tasked with rearranging the…
We present an educational escape room in physics (ERP) covering the main disciplines of physics as taught in the education of neighboring sciences, in this case veterinary medicine, extended by a European board game system of victory points…
Many animals, and an increasing number of artificial agents, display sophisticated capabilities to perceive and manipulate objects. But human beings remain distinctive in their capacity for flexible, creative tool use -- using objects in…
Many neurodivergent (ND) children are integrated into mainstream schools alongside their neurotypical (NT) peers. However, they often face social exclusion, which may have lifelong effects. Inclusive play activities can be a strong driver…
What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning? We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine learning and developmental robotics. We argue that…