Related papers: What we talk about when we talk about physics prob…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
In a companion paper, we discuss students' ability to take advantage of what they learn from a solved problem and transfer their learning to solve a quiz problem that has different surface features but the same underlying physics…
This paper proposes a formal cognitive framework for problem solving based on category theory. We introduce cognitive categories, which are categories with exactly one morphism between any two objects. Objects in these categories are…
The purpose of this work is to explore a teaching methodology aimed at communicating topics and subjects not typically studied and analyzed in the (Italian) secondary school. We focused specifically on the use of videogames as a…
We address the question "How do students make sense of Physics from the point of view of constituting physics knowledge?". A phenomenographic study is described as a result of which we present six qualitatively different ways in which…
Quantum physics is considered as one of the most remarkable discoveries of contemporary physics grown during previous century and gradually manifested to the scientific world such as inventions of laser, the transistor, the electron…
We report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…
We explore the overlap of two nationally-recognized learning outcomes for physics lab courses, namely, the ability to model experimental systems and the ability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning apparatus. Modeling and troubleshooting are…
Most students struggle when faced with complex and ill-structured tasks because the strategies taught in schools and universities simply require finding and applying the correct formulae or strategy to answer well-structured, algorithmic…
Physics problems constitute a significant aspect of reasoning, necessitating complicated reasoning ability and abundant physics knowledge. However, existing large language models (LLMs) frequently fail due to a lack of knowledge or…
Over the past 25 years, I have been involved in some intriguing developments in the foundations of physics, exploring the quantum reality problem, the relationship between quantum theory and gravity and the interplay between consciousness…
We analyze the problem solving strategies of physics professors in a case where their physical intuition fails. A non-intuitive introductory-level problem was identified and posed to twenty physics professors. The problem placed the…
Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics, or the institution it is presented in. In order to better integrate computational thinking in introductory…
Regular physics is unsatisfactory in that it fails to take into consideration phenomena relating to mind and meaning, whereas on the other side of the cultural divide such constructs have been studied in detail. This paper discusses a…
Learning to use math in physics involves combining (blending) our everyday experiences and the conceptual ideas of physics with symbolic mathematical representations. Graphs are one of the best ways to learn to build the blend. They are a…
Most of computer science focuses on automatically solving given computational problems. I focus on automatically inventing or discovering problems in a way inspired by the playful behavior of animals and humans, to train a more and more…
The Hopfield model, originally inspired by spin-glass physics, occupies a central place at the intersection of statistical mechanics, neural networks, and modern artificial intelligence. Despite its conceptual simplicity and broad…
We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education…
As part of a larger study to understand instructors' considerations regarding the learning and teaching of problem solving in an introductory physics course, we investigated beliefs of first-year graduate teaching assistants (TAs) regarding…
Nonlinear models and optimization methods have successfully tackled a rapidly growing set of problems in recent years. Indeed, a relatively small toolbox of such models and methods can provide sufficient performance across a large landscape…