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In this article, we reflect upon our positive experiences incorporating or working on extra credit projects in algebra-based introductory physics that asked students to connect physics with humanities, social sciences, and everyday life. We…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns…
The arrival of AI coding assistants in educational settings presents a paradigm shift, introducing a "new kid in the classroom" for both students and instructors. Thus, understanding the perceptions of these key actors about this new…
While it is well known which curricular practices can improve student performance on measures of conceptual understanding, the sustaining of these practices and the role of faculty members in implementing these practices are less well…
The paper describes a curricular framework for introducing microcontroller programming in the University Physics lab. The approach makes use of Modeling Instruction, an effective approach for teaching science at the secondary level in which…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown…
Introducing inner-city high school students to program design presents unique challenges. The typical assumptions of an introductory programming course, like students understand what variables and functions are, may not be safe. Therefore,…
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…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
We describe a course designed to help future educators build an integrated understanding of the different elements of physics education research (PER), including: research into student learning, content knowledge from the perspective of how…
Introductory mechanics ("physics 1") is a critical gateway course for students desiring to pursue a STEM career. A major challenge with this course is that there is a large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation, and this…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed…
A national survey of physics faculty was conducted to investigate the prevalence and nature of computational instruction in physics courses across the United States. 1246 faculty from 357 unique institutions responded to the survey. The…
This study, conducted among more than 250 physics and chemistry teachers in Morocco, analyzes the impact of experimentation on student learning and attention in middle and high school. The results show that the majority of teachers favor…
The Institute of Physics New Quantum Curriculum (quantumphysics.iop.org) consists of online texts and interactive simulations with accompanying activities for an introductory course in quantum mechanics starting from two-level systems.…
In a first course to classical mechanics elementary physical processes like elastic two-body collisions, the mass-spring model, or the gravitational two-body problem are discussed in detail. The continuation to many-body systems, however,…
We report results from a study designed to identify links between undergraduate students' views about experimental physics and their engagement in multiweek projects in lab courses. Using surveys and interviews, we explored whether students…
Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high…
Robots are a popular platform for introducing computing and artificial intelligence to novice programmers. However, programming state-of-the-art robots is very challenging, and requires knowledge of concurrency, operation safety, and…
Background: As traditional coding tasks in education become increasingly vulnerable to the use of Generative AI, there is a critical need for authentic, project-based assessments that evaluate students' scientific inquiry. To address this…