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The Engage to Excel (PCAST) report, the National Research Council's Framework for K-12 Science Education, and the Next Generation Science Standards all call for transforming the physics classroom into an environment that teaches students…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…
Research in cognitive science has provided extensive evidence of human cognitive ability in performing physical reasoning of objects from noisy perceptual inputs. Such a cognitive ability is commonly known as intuitive physics. With…
One of the most important active methodologies for physics learning developed in recent years is peer instruction. Its technique has allowed, among other things, to monitor students' conceptual learning. In this sense,…
We describe a project-based computational physics course developed using a backwards course design approach. From an initial competency-based model of problem solving in computational physics, we interviewed faculty who use these tools in…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
During the last decade we have witnessed an impressive development in so-called interpreted languages and computational environments such as Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Matlab etc. Problems which until recently were typically solved on…
As belief around the potential of computational social science grows, fuelled by recent advances in machine learning, data scientists are ostensibly becoming the new experts in education. Scholars engaged in critical studies of education…
Learning advanced physics, in general, is challenging not only due to the increased mathematical sophistication but also because one must continue to build on all of the prior knowledge acquired at the introductory and intermediate levels.…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…
Quantum mechanics is difficult to learn because it is counterintuitive, hard to visualize, mathematically challenging, and abstract. The Physics Education Technology (PhET) Project, known for its interactive computer simulations for…
Experience with experimental and computational work are important components of students' understanding of the practice of physics. Physics departments typically use specific experimental lab courses and computational lab courses to develop…
Contribution: In this study, an alternative educational approach for introducing quantum computing to a wider audience is highlighted. The proposed methodology considers quantum computing as a generalized probability theory rather than a…
Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality…
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
Learning to code, and more broadly, learning about computer science is a growing field of activity and research. Under the label of computational thinking, computational concepts are increasingly used as cognitive tools in many subject…
These lecture notes are an informal introduction to the theory of computational complexity and its links to quantum computing and statistical mechanics.
Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics has challenged our conceptions of how the universe ought to work; however, the equations of quantum mechanics can be too computationally difficult to solve…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
This paper investigates how high school students in an introductory computer science course approach computing in the Logic Programming (LP) paradigm. This qualitative study shows how novice students operate within the LP paradigm while…