物理教育
Boundary conditions (BCs) are considered as an important topic that advanced physics under- graduates are expected to understand and apply. We report findings from an investigation of student difficulties using boundary conditions (BCs) in…
Student-to-student interactions are foundational to many active learning environments, but are most often studied using qualitative methods. Network analysis tools provide a quantitative complement to this picture, allowing researchers to…
Science is an inherently quantitative endeavor, and general education science courses are taken by a majority of college students. As such, they are a powerful venue for advancing students' skills and attitudes toward mathematics. This…
Student learning in instructional physics labs is a growing area of research that includes studies exploring students' beliefs and expectations about experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies about experimental…
Building on successful work on studying and transforming our senior-level Advanced Lab course, we have transformed our junior-level Electronics course to engage students in a variety of authentic scientific practices, including…
When optically excited, iodine absorbs in the 490- to 650-nm visible region of the spectrum and, after radiative relaxation, it displays an emission spectrum of discrete vibrational bands at moderate resolution. This makes laser-induced…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
In collaborative small-group work, physics students need to both manage social conflict and grapple with conceptual and epistemological differences. In this paper, we document several outlets that students use as tools for managing social…
The key to the success of pocket microscopes stems from the convenience for anyone to magnify the fine details (tens of micrometres) of any object on-thespot. The capability with a portable microscope lets us surpass our limited vision and…
In this small scale study we demonstrate how a gamified teaching setup can be used effectively to support student learning in a quantum mechanics course. The quantum mechanics games were research games, which were played during lectures and…
Recently, some discussions arose as to the definition of charge and the value of the density of charge in stationary-current-carrying conductors. We stress that the problem of charge definition comes from a misunderstanding of the usual…
We show that the baking of potato wedges constitutes a crunchy example of edge effects, which are usually demonstrated in electrostatics. A simple model of the diffusive transport of water vapor around the potato wedges shows that the water…
A diagram that represents both conservation of energy and constancy of entropy in Carnot cycle.
When Alice went `Through the Looking Glass' [1], she found herself in a situation where she had to run as fast as she could in order to stay still. In accordance with the dictum that truth is stranger than fiction, we will see that it is…
Beginning in autumn 2008 the first generation of astronomy master students will start a 2 year course in Astrophysics offered by the Physics department of the University of Split, Croatia (http://fizika.pmfst.hr/astro/english/index.html).…
We report the first ultrafast pulse radiolysis transient absorption spectroscopy measurements from the Terawatt Ultrafast High Field Facility (TUHFF) at Argonne National Laboratory. TUHFF houses a 20 TW Ti:sapphire laser system that…
During the past several years the authors have developed a new approach to the teaching of Physical Science, a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. This approach, called `Physics…
Optical Doppler shift demonstration experiments are not a simple task since the light source cannot usually be moved in a sufficiently smooth and uniform manner to keep the level of noise well below of that of the signal. For that reason…
A simple tight-binding model is used to illustrate how the time dependence of a state vector can be obtained from all the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian. The behavior of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors is studied for…
A simple setup was assembled to study the motion of an object while it falls. The setup was used to determine the instantaneous velocity, terminal velocity and acceleration due to gravity. Also, since the whole project was done within $20…