Related papers: Teaching Physics in the Woods
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…
A difficult challenge in physics education is to design professional development programs for teachers, which can lead to fundamental changes in their practise. We report all activities for physics teachers in the context of the National…
Physics can be seen as a conceptual approach to scientific problems, a method for discovery, but teaching this aspect of our discipline can be a challenge. We report on a first-time remote teaching experience for a computational physics…
The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
Light Polarization has many technological applications and its discovery was crucial to reveal the transverse nature of the electromagnetic waves. However, despite its fundamental and practical importance, in high school this property of…
Student learning of sound waves can be helped through the creation of group-learning classroom materials whose development and design rely on explicit investigations into student understanding. We describe reasoning in terms of sets of…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
The case-study teaching method has a long history (starting at least with Socrates), and wide current use in business schools, medical schools, law schools, and a variety of other disciplines. However, relatively little use is made of it in…
Energy concepts are fundamental across the sciences, yet these concepts can be fragmented along disciplinary boundaries, rather than integrated into a coherent whole. To teach physics effectively to biology students, we need to understand…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
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…
Physics has a reputation among majority of life sciences students for being very complicated and tough. If we leave students with this impression, it is likely that students see physics class as useless and irrelevant to life sciences.…
The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce…
In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses. Physics departments are offering…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
This paper describes a network of teachers and students who form a living system of education at all levels and achieve high standards. The key process of the network is the process of effective learning by inquiry. Physics is distinguished…
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…
Most science classes and in particular Physics are delivered through traditional teaching methods. More specifically, in the traditional stand-and-deliver lecture, the information was transmitted unilaterally from the teacher to the student…
Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to…