Related papers: Britannia Rule the Waves
The students are introduced to navigation in general, and, in particular, the skills the medieval people of the Vikings used to navigate on the open sea. The topics of navigation and the Vikings are introduced by questions and a short…
An investigation on student understanding of waves is performed during an optional laboratory realized in informal extracurricular way with few, interested and talented pupils. The background and smart intuitions of students rendered the…
This lesson unit has been developed within the framework the EU Space Awareness project. It provides an insight into the history and navigational methods of the Bronze Age Mediterranean peoples. The students explore the link between…
Consider a stationary agent A at an unknown location and a mobile agent B that must move to the vicinity of and then circumnavigate A at a prescribed distance from A. In doing so, B can only measure its distance from A, and knows its own…
Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…
Longitude determination at sea gained increasing commercial importance in the late Middle Ages, spawned by a commensurate increase in long-distance merchant shipping activity. Prior to the successful development of an accurate marine…
Navigation is one of the most heavily studied problems in robotics, and is conventionally approached as a geometric mapping and planning problem. However, real-world navigation presents a complex set of physical challenges that defies…
A covariant and invariant theory of navigation in curved space-time with respect to electromagnetic beacons is written in terms of J. L. Synge's two-point invariant world function. Explicit equations are given for navigation in space-time…
Voyages of exploration often included astronomers among their crew to aid with maritime navigation. William Dawes, a British Marine who had been trained in practical astronomy, was assigned to the "First Fleet", a convoy of eleven ships…
Following Columbus' voyages to the Americas, Castilian (Spanish) and Portuguese rulers engaged in heated geopolitical competition, which was eventually reconciled through a number of treaties that divided the world into two unequal…
Treating time as a local variable permits robust approaches to kinematics that forego questions of extended-simultaneity, which because of their abstract nature might not be addressed explicitly until a first relativity course and even then…
Two problems from the Victorian Age, the subdivision of light and the determination of the leakage point in an undersea telegraphic cable are discussed and suggested as a concrete illustrations of the relationships between textbook physics…
Learning to navigate unknown environments from scratch is a challenging problem. This work presents a system that integrates world models with curiosity-driven exploration for autonomous navigation in new environments. We evaluate…
Robotic navigation concerns the task in which a robot should be able to find a safe and feasible path and traverse between two points in a complex environment. We approach the problem of robotic navigation using reinforcement learning and…
Formally second-order correct, mathematical descriptions of long-crested water waves propagating mainly in one direction are derived. These equations are analogous to the first-order approximations of KdV- or BBM-type. The advantage of…
This paper presents some ideas which might assist teachers incorporating special relativity into an introductory physics curriculum. One can define the proper-time/velocity pair, as well as the coordinate-time/velocity pair, of a traveler…
This paper frames calculus as a global, centuries-long development rather than a subject that began only with Newton and Leibniz. Drawing on ideas from Greek, Indian, Islamic, and later European mathematics, it highlights how concepts like…
This paper presents for the first time a detailed analysis of fine-grained navigation style identification in MOOCs backed by a large number of active learners. The result shows 1) whilst the sequential style is clearly in evidence, the…
The impact of inquiry-based instruction on the improvement of content knowledge of electricity and wave properties in two studies was the subject of this investigation. Groups of pre-college and undergraduate students performed a series of…
We report on a course project in which students submit weekly probabilistic forecasts of two weather variables and one financial variable. This real-time format allows students to engage in practical forecasting, which requires a diverse…