Related papers: A quest for a fair schedule: The Young Physicists'…
During the last few decades scientists have been able to test the bases of the physics paradigms, where the quantum mechanics has to match the cosmological scales. Between the extremes of this scenario, biological phenomena and their…
Competitive programming (CP) contests are often treated as interchangeable proxies for algorithmic skill, yet the extent to which results at lower contest tiers anticipate performance at higher tiers, and how closely any tier resembles the…
This paper presents an overview of the sixth AIBIRDS competition, held at the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This competition tasked participants with developing an intelligent agent which can play the…
Game AI competitions are important to foster research and development on Game AI and AI in general. These competitions supply different challenging problems that can be translated into other contexts, virtual or real. They provide…
We present two programs that address needs to better prepare graduate students for their roles as professional physicists, particularly in the areas of teaching and education research. The two programs, Preparing Future Physicists (PFP) and…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
We describe an initiative at the University of Bonn, where the students develop and perform a 2 hour physics show for school classes and the general public. The show is entertaining and educational and is aimed at children aged 10 and…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…
Science and Engineering fairs offer K-12 students opportunities to engage with authentic STEM practices. Particularly, students are given the chance to experience authentic and open inquiry processes, by defining which themes, questions and…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swiss-system chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of…
In the last round of the FIFA World Cup group stage, games for which the outcome does not affect the selection of the qualified teams are played with little enthusiasm. Furthermore, a team that has already qualified may take into account…
A $k$-coloring of a tournament is a partition of its vertices into $k$ acyclic sets. Deciding if a tournament is 2-colorable is NP-hard. A natural problem, akin to that of coloring a 3-colorable graph with few colors, is to color a…
In physics labs, students experience a wide range of equitable and inequitable interactions. We developed a methodology to characterize different lab groups in terms of their bid exchanges and inchargeness. An equitable group is one in…
High school physics competitions serve as a platform for talented students to showcase their skills, engage in challenging problems, and foster a passion for science. This paper explores innovative approaches to enhance these competitions…
Mathematical reasoning with algebraic and graphical representations is essential for success in physics courses. Many problems require students to fluently move between algebraic and graphical representations. We developed a freely…
The article presents a system for testing the independence of solutions to algorithmic problems sent by students as part of the student programming competition. First, the context was discussed, as well as the need to organize programming…
In order to attract and retain excellent researchers and diverse individuals in astrophysics, we recommend action be taken in several key areas impacting young scientists: (1) Maintain balance between large collaborations and individual…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…