Related papers: Improving students' understanding of rotating fram…
The teaching of abstract physics concepts can be enhanced by incorporating visual and haptic sensory modalities in the classroom, using the correct perspectives. We have developed virtual reality simulations to assist students in learning…
We investigated the common difficulties that students have with concepts related to rotational and rolling motion covered in the introductory physics courses. We compared the performance of calculus- and algebra-based introductory physics…
Highly successful students, as measured by grades and by scores on the Force Concept Inventory, still struggle with fundamental concepts in mathematics and physics. These difficulties, which turn physics into parrot learning and include…
The major difficulty when one teaches about non-inertial reference frames in undergraduate courses on Classical Mechanics is to find an intuitive way to derive the Coriolis acceleration. Indeed, there is a factor of 2 in the formula for the…
Framing affects how students interpret, approach, and accomplish tasks. Little is known, however, about how students frame tasks in physics labs. During the first lab of a sequence designed to teach students about modeling and critical…
As a subject, an observer is fundamentally at rest in a reference frame, and this being at rest allows for measuring the motion of physical objects. Exploring the experience of centrifugal force brings to the fore the natural inclination to…
One of the many surprising results found in the mechanics of rotating systems is the stabilization of a particle in a rapidly rotating planar saddle potential. Besides the counterintuitive stabilization, an unexpected precessional motion is…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
Scene graph prediction --- classifying the set of objects and predicates in a visual scene --- requires substantial training data. However, most predicates only occur a handful of times making them difficult to learn. We introduce the first…
Originally introduced in connection with general relativistic Coriolis forces, the term $\textit{frame-dragging}$ is associated today with a plethora of effects related to the off-diagonal element of the metric tensor. It is also frequently…
In textbooks of geophysical fluid dynamics, the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force in a rotating fluid system are derived by making use of the fluid parcel concept. In contrast to this intuitive derivation to the apparent forces, more…
To collaborate well with robots, we must be able to understand their decision making. Humans naturally infer other agents' beliefs and desires by reasoning about their observable behavior in a way that resembles inverse reinforcement…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices…
The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems.…
The motion of astronomical bodies and the centre of mass of the system is not always well perceived by students. One of the struggles is the conceptual change of reference frame, which is the same that held back the acceptance of the…
Particles in rotating saddle potentials exhibit precessional motion which, up to now, has been explained by explicit computation. We show that this precession is due to a hidden Coriolis-like force which, unlike the standard Coriolis force,…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
A priority of physics instruction is to help students make the connection between the formulae they think they are required to memorize and the real world in which they interact every day. If you ask students to describe a situation in real…
What kind of problem-solving instruction can help students apply what they have learned to solve the new and unfamiliar problems they will encounter in the future? We propose that mathematical sensemaking, the practice of seeking coherence…