Related papers: The Object Coordination Class Applied to Wavepulse…
Controlling systems governed by partial differential equations is an inherently hard problem. Specifically, control of wave dynamics is challenging due to additional physical constraints and intrinsic properties of wave phenomena such as…
Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors through their…
The World model is an existing functional input-output mechanism for event-driven programming. It is used in numerous popular textbooks and curricular settings. The World model conflates two different tasks -- the definition of an event…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
Wegner describes coordination as constrained interaction. We take this approach literally and define a coordination model based on interaction constraints and partial, iterative and interactive constraint satisfaction. Our model captures…
We use Rice's formulas in order to compute the moments of some level functionals which are linked to problems in oceanography and optics. For instance, we consider the number of specular points in one or two dimensions, the number of…
The theme of the World Conference on Physics Education 2012 is "Context, Culture, and Representations." In this talk I present a brief outline of a theoretical framework that allows us to discuss these issues using a model based in…
This second paper in a multi-part series builds on the first, which introduced the Ways of Thinking for Engineering Design-based Physics (WoT4EDP) framework for STEM education in an introductory undergraduate physics course. Here, we apply…
In this paper we present an approach and a benchmark for visual reasoning in robotics applications, in particular small object grasping and manipulation. The approach and benchmark are focused on inferring object properties from visual and…
Algorithms of inference in a computer system oriented to input and semantic processing of text information are presented. Such inference is necessary for logical questions when the direct comparison of objects from a question and database…
The coherent control of wave absorption has important applications in areas such as energy harvesting, imaging, and sensing. However, most practical scenarios involve the absorption of partially coherent rather than fully coherent waves.…
Active learning comprises many varied techniques that engage students actively in the construction of their understanding. Because of this variation, different active learning techniques may be best suited to achieving different learning…
Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have shown impressive capabilities in natural language reasoning. However, these models frequently demonstrate inefficiencies or inaccuracies when tackling complex mathematical operations. While…
Spatial reasoning -- the ability to perceive and reason about relationships in space -- advances vision-language models (VLMs) from visual perception toward spatial semantic understanding. Existing approaches either revisit local image…
Recently, diffusion models have garnered significant interest in the field of text processing due to their many potential advantages compared to conventional autoregressive models. In this work, we propose Diffusion-of-Thought (DoT), a…
We present a novel task that measures how people generalize objects' causal powers based on observing a single (Experiment 1) or a few (Experiment 2) causal interactions between object pairs. We propose a computational modeling framework…
From flocking birds to schooling fish, organisms interact to form collective dynamics across the natural world. Self-organization is present at smaller scales as well: cells interact and move during development to produce patterns in fish…
Computational thinking is a way of reasoning about the world in terms of data. This mindset channels number crunching toward an ambition to discover knowledge through logic, models and simulations. Here we show how computational cognitive…