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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…
Neurosymbolic Programming (NP) techniques have the potential to accelerate scientific discovery. These models combine neural and symbolic components to learn complex patterns and representations from data, using high-level concepts or known…
Get 'em Moles! is a single-player educational game inspired by the classic arcade game Whac-A-Mole. Primarily designed for touchscreen devices, Get 'em Moles! aims to teach English spelling and pronunciation through engaging game play. This…
Chain-of-thought prompting (e.g., "Let's think step-by-step") primes large language models to verbalize rationalization for their predictions. While chain-of-thought can lead to dramatic performance gains, benefits appear to emerge only for…
This paper shares a classroom story from Fall 2022 to Spring 2025 about a learner centered routine in undergraduate mathematics. I use four steps: an opening question, a short mini lecture about meaning, structured small group work, and a…
"No two rainbows are the same. Neither are two packs of Skittles. Enjoy an odd mix!". Using an interpretation via spatial random walks, we quantify the probability that two randomly selected packs of Skittles candy are identical and…
Natural languages can express some logical propositions that humans are able to understand. We illustrate this fact with a famous text that Conan Doyle attributed to Holmes: 'It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the…
Due to the shift of civilization from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, mathematical literacy has become a necessity in the twenty-first century. However, in order to learn and contribute to the mathematical community, one has to…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
In many applications of the probabilistic method, one looks to study phenomena that occur ``with high probability''. More recently however, in an attempt to understand some of the most fundamental problems in combinatorics, researchers have…
The purpose of this paper (which, in many passages, I take the liberty of writing in the first person singular for bringing a personal experience) is to show how teachers of Physics and Mathematics in Basic Education can teach, through a…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at many supervised tasks but often struggle with structured reasoning in unfamiliar settings. This discrepancy suggests that standard fine-tuning pipelines may instill narrow, domain-specific heuristics…
To be successful, junior faculty must properly manage their time in the face of expanding responsibilities. One such responsibility is supervising undergraduate research projects. Student research projects (either single or multi-student)…
Background: Dataset skills are used in STEM fields from healthcare work to astronomy research. Few fields explicitly teach students the skills to analyze datasets, and yet the increasing push for authentic science implies these skills…
Scientific writing is an important skill for a career as a professional astrophysicist. Very few researchers, however, receive any formal training in how to write scientific research papers of high quality in an efficient manner. This paper…
We introduce LLM CHESS, an evaluation framework designed to probe the generalization of reasoning and instruction-following abilities in large language models (LLMs) through extended agentic interaction in the domain of chess. We rank over…
I describe some deep-seated problems in higher mathematical education, and give some ideas for their solution -- I advocate a move away from the traditional introduction of mathematics through calculus, and towards computation and discrete…
In India, as in many countries, the main focus in science classrooms is on exams rather than musing on the fascinating concepts and understanding of the world that science offers. This can mean that students lose interest in studying…
Teaching Unix to new students is a common tasks in many higher schools. This paper presents an approach to such course where the students progress autonomously with the help of the teacher. The traditional textbook is complemented with a…
This paper draws together nine strategies for creative visualization activities. Teaching visualization often involves running learning activities where students perform tasks that directly support one or more topics that the teacher wishes…