An amusement park is full of examples that can be made into challenging problems for students, combining mathematical modelling with video analysis, as well as measurements in the rides. Traditional amusement ride related textbook problems include free-fall, circular motion, pendula and energy conservation in roller coasters, where the moving…

We have developed an online oscilloscope program which allows users to see waveforms by utilizing their computer microphones, selecting from our library of over 30 audio files, and opening any *.mp3 or *.wav file on their computers. The oscilloscope displays real-time signals against time. The oscilloscope has been calibrated so one can make…

The importance of this research is the use of WhatsApp in physics instruction beyond the classroom. This study evaluated the content of conversations in a in a class-wide WhatsApp group of high-school physics students (e.g., the goals of the conversations, topics of conversation, the hours at which conversations were conducted, and who…

The year 2014 marked the four-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Galileo's birth, making it the perfect occasion to present and illustrate a GeoGebra applet which reproduces some of Galileo's celebrated experiments on the uniformly accelerated motion, as reported on in "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New…

Over the past 25 years, the Davidson College Physics Department has developed small computer programs called Physlets. These programs were written in Java and distributed as Java applets embedded in HTML pages. Physics teachers from around the world used Physlets to author interactive computer-based curricular materials for the teaching of…

Video analysis with a 30 Hz frame rate is the standard tool in physics education. The development of affordable high-speed-cameras has extended the capabilities of the tool for much smaller time scales to the 1 ms range, using frame rates of typically up to 1000 frames s[superscript -1], allowing us to study transient physics phenomena happening…

Carrying out classroom experiments that demonstrate Boyle's law and Gay-Lussac's law can be challenging. Even if we are able to conduct classroom experiments using pressure gauges and syringes, the results of these experiments do little to illuminate the kinetic theory of gases. However, molecular dynamics simulations that run on computers allow…

Probing university students' understanding of direct-current (DC) resistive circuits is still a field of active physics education research. We report here on a study we conducted of this understanding, where the cohort consisted of students in a large-enrollment first-year physics module. This is a non-calculus based physics module for students in…