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In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…

Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…

Writing a scientific article is a challenging task as it is a highly codified genre. Good writing skills are essential to properly convey ideas and results of research work. Since the majority of scientific articles are currently written in…

Most work on scholarly document processing assumes that the information processed is trustworthy and factually correct. However, this is not always the case. There are two core challenges, which should be addressed: 1) ensuring that…

The ability to represent scientific data and concepts visually is becoming increasingly important due to the unprecedented exponential growth of computational power during the present digital age. The data sets and simulations scientists in…

What do we teach and what should we teach? An honest answer to this question is painful, very painful--what we teach lags decades behind what we practice. How can we reduce this `gap' to prepare a data science workforce of trained…

Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…

Modern data and applications pose very different challenges from those of the 1950s or even the 1980s. Students contemplating a career in statistics or data science need to have the tools to tackle problems involving massive, heavy-tailed…

For many students, introductory college science courses are often the only opportunity in their formal higher education to be exposed to science, shaping their view of the subject, their scientific literacy, and their attitudes towards…

Oral exams were common historically across academia, though their popularity has recently fallen. Many argue against them as an assessment technique because they are vulnerable to bias and subjectivity, difficult to administer, and…

In this chapter, we provide advice on how to effectively teach survey research based on lessons learned from several international teaching experiences on the topic and from conducting large-scale surveys published at various scientific…

Good problems grab us. They invite us to find patterns, make conjectures, and prove-or perhaps disprove-a conjecture. When I first taught, I saw my work as tantalizing students with structures just beyond their reach, so that I could elicit…

Scientists spend an increasing amount of time building and using software. However, most scientists are never taught how to do this efficiently. As a result, many are unaware of tools and practices that would allow them to write more…

Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning.…

Open conversations are one of the most engaging forms of teaching. However, creating those conversations in educational software is a complex endeavor, especially if we want to address the needs of different audiences. While language models…

Citation recommendation describes the task of recommending citations for a given text. Due to the overload of published scientific works in recent years on the one hand, and the need to cite the most appropriate publications when writing…

When you have a question, the most effective way to have the question answered is to directly connect with experts on the topic and have a conversation with them. Prior to the invention of writing, this was the only way. Although effective,…

The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce…

Previous studies conclusively show that pencil-and-paper lecture-tutorials (LTs) are incredibly effective at increasing student engagement and learning gains on a variety of topics when compared to traditional lecture. LTs in astronomy are…

As a response to the trends of the increasing importance of computational approaches and the accelerating pace in science, I propose in this position paper to establish the concept of "science bots" that autonomously perform programmed…