Although acoustics examples and demonstrations can be an effective tool for engaging students in introductory physics classes and outreach, teaching principles of sound and vibration to the deaf and hard of hearing needs to be approached carefully. The deaf and hard of hearing have less intuition with sound but are no strangers to some of the…

A recent note in this journal presented a demonstration of standing waves along a cord consisting of two parts having different material densities, showing different sized wavelengths in each part. A generalization of that experiment to a continuously varying linear mass density is to vibrate a strip of material with gradually varying width (mass…

An operational understanding of Newton's third law is often elusive for students. Typical examples of this concept are given for contact forces that are closer to the students' everyday experience. While this is a good thing in general, the reaction force can sometimes be taken for granted, and the students can miss the opportunity to really think…

When working on an oral history project, my brother recommended that I download a free audio recording and editing program called Audacity[R]. I have since discovered that it is a fantastic tool for students to visualize sound waves and to understand the meaning of amplitude, frequency, and superposition. This paper describes a collection of…

In my previous article on apparatus named after physicists and physics teachers, I discussed five relatively common pieces of apparatus from the 1875-1910 era. Now I will go back to the 18th and early-19th centuries to discuss eponymous apparatus that we are still using in lecture demonstrations. [For Part I, see EJ912907.]

Our aim in this proposal is to use Faraday's law of induction as a simple lecture demonstration to measure the Earths magnetic field (B). This will also enable the students to learn about how electric power is generated from rotational motion. Obviously the idea is not original, yet it may be attractive in the sense that no sophisticated devices…

It's always hard to know what to expect when bringing computers into an educational setting, as things are always changing. Student skills with computers are different today than they were 10 years ago, and 20 years ago almost counts as an alien world. Still, one hopes that some of these changes result in positive trends, such as student attitudes…

Interactive lecture demonstrations (ILDs) are a powerful tool designed to help instructors bring state-of-the-art teaching pedagogies into the college-level introductory physics classroom. ILDs have been shown to improve students' conceptual understanding, and many examples have been created and published by Sokoloff and Thornton. We have used the…

Twenty secondary physics teachers from southeast Michigan participated in a National Science Foundation Honors workshop on excellence in physics teaching. Presented are the classroom practices, important resources, and roles for good programs they identified and their recommendations for improving student/counselor/administrator perceptions of…