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Navigation research is attracting renewed interest with the advent of learning-based methods. However, this new line of work is largely disconnected from well-established classic navigation approaches. In this paper, we take a step towards…
This article describes an exemplary robot exercise which was conducted in a class for mechatronics students. The goal of this exercise was to engage students in scientific thinking and reasoning, activities which do not always play an…
With increasing popularity in online learning, a surge of E-learning platforms have emerged to facilitate education opportunities for k-12 (from kindergarten to 12th grade) students and with this, a wealth of information on their learning…
As social VR applications grow in popularity, blind and low vision users encounter continued accessibility barriers. Yet social VR, which enables multiple people to engage in the same virtual space, presents a unique opportunity to allow…
Popular accounts of exciting discoveries often draw students to physics and astronomy, but at the introductory level it is challenging to connect with these in a meaningful way. The use of real astronomical data in the classroom can help…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
A ball on a stick is a common and simple activity for teaching the phases of the Moon. This activity, like many others in physics and astronomy, gives students a perspective they otherwise could only imagine. For Moon phases, a third person…
Evidence that visual communication preceded written language and provided a basis for it goes back to prehistory, in forms such as cave and rock paintings depicting traces of our distant ancestors. Emergent communication research has sought…
Most current approaches to social navigation focus on the trajectory and position of participants in the interaction. Our current work on the topic focuses on integrating gaze into social navigation, both to cue nearby pedestrians as to the…
This theoretical paper introduces a new way to view and characterize teaching and learning astronomy. It describes a framework, based on results from empirical data, analyzed through standard qualitative research methodology, in which a…
I describe how to obtain a rather good experimental determination of the eccentricity of the Earth orbit, as well as the obliquity of the Earth rotation axis, by measuring, over the course of a year, the elevation of the Sun as a function…
I discuss some interesting classroom demonstrations of diamagnetism and how this effect can produce levitation. The possibilities for hands-on demonstrations of diamagnetic and superconducting levitation are discussed. To conclude I discuss…
Visual Indoor Navigation (VIN) task has drawn increasing attention from the data-driven machine learning communities especially with the recently reported success from learning-based methods. Due to the innate complexity of this task,…
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In this work, we present Wild Visual Navigation (WVN), an…
A method is described to empower students to efficiently perform general and literature searches using online resources. The method was tested on undergraduate and graduate students with varying backgrounds with scientific literature.…
This activity has been developed as a resource for the "EU Space Awareness" educational programme. As part of the suite "Our Fragile Planet" together with the "Climate Box" it addresses aspects of weather phenomena, the Earth's climate and…
In this short essay, we show how computer experiments, and especially visualization, allowed for the investigation and discovery of phenomena which would have passed unnoticed. We shall also highlight the importance of interactivity between…
Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the…
Two new interplanetary technologies have advanced in the past decade to the point where they may enable exciting, affordable missions that reach further and faster deep into the outer regions of our solar system: (i) small and capable…
One of the main difficulties that students have in learning astronomy topics is that they fail to relate theoretical information with what they experience in the world around them. The construction by students of a conceptual framework in…