Related papers: Funny Problems!
This article contains a selection of problems from the American Mathematics Competitions.
Due to the remarkable language understanding and generation abilities of large language models (LLMs), their use in educational applications has been explored. However, little work has been done on investigating the pedagogical ability of…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on advanced reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding competitions. Meanwhile, physics, despite being both reasoning-intensive and essential to real-world understanding,…
We encounter mathematical problems in various forms in our lives, thus making mathematical thinking an important human ability. In this paper, we present Bublz!, a simple, click-driven game for children to engage in and develop mathematical…
The aim of this paper is to introduce a mathematical logic based approach investigating why-type questions in physics.
The results of the National High School Examination (ENEM) are an important tool for a diagnosis of educational deficiencies at the end of a training cycle. This exam is a relevant source of data for the evaluation of what is learned by…
This is a pedagogical article cited in the foregoing research note, quant-ph/9911050
Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is…
Misconception is the difference between a student's idea and his scientific concept. Physics learning needs to be designed by teachers to minimize misconceptions. Different diagnostic tools have been developed and used by researchers to…
Many Physics Education Researchers have discussed the positive correlation between students' incoming mathematics skills and performance in their physics classes. Thus, in order to strengthen their performance gains in their physics…
Mathematicians occasionally discover interesting truths even when they are playing with mathematical ideas with no thoughts about possible consequences of their actions. This paper describes two specific instances of this phenomenon. The…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Courses in mathematical methods for physics students are not known for including too much in the way of mathematical rigour and, in some ways, understandably so. However, the conditions under which some quite commonly used mathematical…
A significant amount of research has considered mathematical proofs, the students who learn them, and the instructors that teach them, from a variety of perspectives. This paper considers this topic from four main perspectives: students'…
One challenge (or opportunity!) that many instructors face is how varied the backgrounds, abilities, and interests of students are. In order to simultaneously instill confidence in those with weaker preparations and still challenge those…
Despite our familiarity with and fondness of humor, until relatively recently very little was known about the underlying psychology of this complex and nuanced phenomenon. Recently, however, cognitive psychologists have begun investigating…
An assumed attribute of expert physicists is that they learn readily from their own mistakes. Experts are unlikely to make the same mistakes when asked to solve a problem a second time, especially if they have had access to a correct…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a give problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
How students use mathematics in their physics classes has been studied extensively in the physics education literature. In addition to specific mathematical methods in specific physics contexts, possible effects of more general "cultural"…