Related papers: Students' difficulties in understanding the basic …
This article reports on an investigation of student understanding of the concept of time in special relativity. A series of research tasks are discussed that illustrate, step-by-step, how student reasoning of fundamental concepts of…
Previous research indicates that after standard instruction students at all academic levels often construct a conceptual framework in which the ideas of absolute simultaneity and the relativity of simultaneity co-exist. This article…
This paper has pedagogical motivation. It is not uncommon that students have great difficulty in accepting the new concepts of standard special relativity, since these seem contrary to common sense. Experience shows that geometrical or…
This review presents an overview and analysis of the body of research on special relativity theory (SRT) education at the secondary and lower undergraduate level. There is currently a growing international interest in implementing SRT in…
Many professional physicists do not fully understand the implications of the Einstein equivalence principle of general relativity. Consequently, many are unaware of the fact that special relativity is fully capable of handling accelerated…
This work analyzes the difficulties in learning and teaching Einstein's theory of special relativity. An extensive bibliographic review has been performed, considering articles published in the most relevant journals on science education,…
A modest aim of this pedagogical presentation is to analyze, critically, certain fundamental physical concepts to illustrate the physical principles behind the special theory of relativity and, hence, to also illustrate the limitations of…
The special theory of relativity has fundamentally changed our views of space and time. The relativity of simultaneity in particular, and the theory of relativity as a whole, still presents significant difficulty for beginners in the…
Real Time Relativity is a computer program that lets students fly at relativistic speeds though a simulated world populated with planets, clocks, and buildings. The counterintuitive and spectacular optical effects of relativity are…
Einstein's general relativity is increasingly important in contemporary physics on the frontiers of both the very largest distance scales (astrophysics and cosmology) and the very smallest(elementary particle physics). This paper makes the…
Cosmology and GR remain largely inaccessible to high-school teaching due to the advanced prerequisites to master these topics. Integrating them into upper secondary teaching is a significant challenge that remains unresolved. This…
Einstein's theory of relativity is largely thought of as one of the most important discoveries of the 20$^{th}$ century and continues to pass observational tests over 100 years later. Yet, it is Newtonian gravity, a 350 year old formalism…
This Resource Letter provides some guidance on issues that arise in teaching general relativity at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Particular emphasis is placed on strategies for presenting the mathematical material needed for…
We give a pedagogical introduction of the essential features of General Theory of Relativity (GTR) in the format of an undergraduate (UG) project. A set of simple MATHEMATICA code is developed which enables the UG students to calculate the…
Introducing Modern Physics represents an increasingly urgent need, towards which physics education concentrates many efforts. In order to contribute to this attempt, at the Department of Mathematics and Physics of Roma Tre University in…
General Relativity (GR) represents the most recent theory of gravity, on which all modern astrophysics is based, including some of the most astonishing results of physics research. Nevertheless, its study is limited to university courses,…
The development of both special and general relativity is accomplished in a series of 6 papers using a simple approach. The purpose is to explain the how and why of relativity to a broad public, and to be useful for students of physics by…
There is no doubt that both the special and general theories of relativity capture the imagination. The anti-intuitive properties of the special theory of relativity and its deep philosophical implications, the bizzare and dazzling…
This paper aims to provide teachers with a tool to teach the essential features of special relativity, considering the students' difficulties highlighted by numerous studies. Our proposal presents special relativity as the solution to the…
We present a study of student learning through the use of virtual reality. A software package is used to introduce concepts of special relativity to students in a game-like environment where users experience the effects of travelling at…