Related papers: Development of a Conceptual Framework for Knowledg…
There has been an increased focus on the integration of practices into physics curricula, with a particular emphasis on integrating computation into the undergraduate curriculum of scientists and engineers. In this paper, we present a…
This work gives a brief summary of major formulations of the third law of thermodynamics and their implications, including the impossibility of perpetual motion of the third kind. The last sections of this work review more advanced…
One area of physics education research has focused on the nature of ontologies (mental categorizations of concepts, substances and processes), and how they might be used to gain insight into student thinking when learning classical physics.…
Common-sense and background knowledge is required to understand natural language, but in most neural natural language understanding (NLU) systems, this knowledge must be acquired from training corpora during learning, and then it is static…
We investigate the difficulties that undergraduate students in quantum mechanics courses have in transferring learning from previous courses or within the same course from one context to another by administering written tests and conducting…
In order to support students in the development of expertise in quantum mechanics, we asked which concepts and structures can act as organizing principles of the non-relativistic theory. The research question has been addressed in a…
We argue that most advances in science and technology during the past and the present centuries rely on modern physics concepts developed in the early $20$th century. The reliance is so profound that any improvement of literacy of science…
We describe a method for deepening a student's understanding of basic physics by asking the student to express physical ideas in a functional programming language. The method is implemented in a second-year course in computational physics…
Machine Teaching (MT) is an interactive process where humans train a machine learning model by playing the role of a teacher. The process of designing an MT system involves decisions that can impact both efficiency of human teachers and…
Einsteinian physics represents a distinct paradigm shift compared to Newtonian physics. There is worldwide interest in introducing Einsteinian physics concepts early in school curriculum and trials have demonstrated that this is feasible.…
We review and extend existing frameworks on modeling to develop a new framework that describes model-based reasoning in upper-division physics labs. Constructing and using models are core scientific practices that have gained significant…
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…
Life mechanics, an emerging field, focuses on the self-organizing forces and motions within living systems. This study introduces the novel concept of active force, generated by mind-body interactions, as an essential element in…
This contribution analyses the classical laws of motion by means of an approach relating time and entropy. We argue that adopting the notion of change of states as opposed to the usual derivation of Newton's laws in terms of fields a…
The notion of concept has been studied for centuries, by philosophers, linguists, cognitive scientists, and researchers in artificial intelligence (Margolis & Laurence, 1999). There is a large literature on formal, mathematical models of…
We report on several specific student difficulties regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of heat engines within upper-division undergraduates thermal physics courses. Data come from ungraded written surveys, graded…
Newton's First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that it is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First Law limits the extent…
The maturity of deep learning techniques has led in recent years to a breakthrough in object recognition in visual media. While for some specific benchmarks, neural techniques seem to match if not outperform human judgement, challenges are…
Wellness and mindfulness act as buzzwords these days, often seen as separate from physics. Yet we know they are important, and everything is related to physics! In this article, we will consider a few simple classroom activities that can…
Newton's third law states that any action is countered by a reaction of equal magnitude but opposite direction. The total force in a system not affected by external forces is thus zero. However, according to the principles of relativity, a…