In a typical undergraduate biochemistry course, two main educational objectives include (1) understanding and applying how genetic mutations can influence protein structure and function, and (2) examining metabolic pathways of biomolecules to study cellular storage and fuel. Many times, these topics can seem disparate to students; therefore, we…

Conceptual knowledge encompasses understanding the interrelationships among multiple pieces of information. Misconceptions of these interrelationships illustrate the need for effective educational strategies to facilitate conceptual change, with the goal of facilitating changes in learner understanding to appropriate, accurate, and complete…

Mathematics is a core component of cognition. Unfortunately, most young children and teachers cannot access research-based early childhood mathematics resources. Building on a quarter-century of research, we are developing and evaluating an innovative, integrated, intelligent, and interactive system of technologies based on empirically validated…

An essential goal for physics and optical science instructors is to encourage students to find excitement and beauty in physical and optical phenomena while helping them learn the theoretical concepts and conducting experiments that can test the validity of the concepts. Such motivation largely relies on realistic hands-on lab opportunities where…

We introduce learning modules in cryptography that can be crafted to motivate many abstract mathematical ideas, and we illustrate with a sample module. These modules can be used in a variety of ways, such as the core for a cryptography course or as motivating topics in other courses such as abstract and linear algebra or number theory.

Forming learners' science concepts and conceptual change entails adaptive epistemic beliefs to support a high degree of interactivity within a coherent knowledge structure. Adaptive epistemic beliefs are characterized by beliefs that knowledge is uncertain and should be justified through experimentation or multiple sources dependent upon the task…

Supersonic free-fall jumps are excellent examples of kinematics in the context of drag. They have attracted a lot of media, public, and scientific interest. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a height of approximately 38.969 km. During his flight he reached a top speed of 373 m/s, becoming the first human to travel faster than the speed of…

Students enrolled in introductory math courses, such as college algebra, deserve to do more than find answers and fix mistakes. We present one interactive digital activity, the Cannon Man "Techtivity," which we developed to provide opportunities for students to develop an understanding of function, beyond just applying a rule, such as…

Inverse and injective functions are topics in most college algebra courses. Yet, current materials and course structures may not afford students' conceptual understanding of these important ideas. We describe how students' work with digital activities, "techtivities," linking two different looking graphs that represent relationships…

Helping students reach a clear understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between changes in parameter and the graph of an equation is the focus of the activity outlined in this article. The behavior of phase shifts has been regarded as counterintuitive for many people, and often, because of this, conflict between student intuition and…

The use of three-dimensional printing in chemistry education has expanded greatly in the past 10 years. The technique has been used to demonstrate a range of concepts including molecular structure, orbitals, and point groups; to produce chemical equipment such as cuvettes and columns; and even to print out mathematical shapes and functions. Here,…

To help engage non-physics majors in a General Physics II (Electricity & Magnetism) course at the University of Indianapolis, students used their smartphones to detect magnetic fields on campus in a semester-long data collection project. This paper discusses details about the design of the project, previous studies that utilize smartphones for…

Making sense of algebraic expressions in context is multifaceted and extends beyond representing real-world situations using algebra. As part of Project MathTalk, the authors created videos that feature a pair of Grade 9 algebra 1 students coming to understand algebraic expressions in context. The students found three aspects of making sense of…

Many physics projects recently designed for high school teachers use Arduino as the main tool for managing sensors and data acquisition. This is a low-cost integrated development environment programmed with a simplified version of the C++ language. In comparison, the Raspberry Pi 3 platform, which also allows for the design of physics projects,…

This article examines a common proportional reasoning problem used in schools, often referred to as the Orange Juice task. The authors show how these six strategies described by Nikula (e.g., Unitizing, Norming, etc.) and one additional strategy can be used to either solve or make progress in the Orange Juice task. The article presents work from…