3D printing (additive manufacturing) is an emerging technology with the ability to make complex, free-form shapes from materials including plastics, metals and ceramics. While additive manufacturing has many advantages over more traditional processes, it can be difficult to control, which can then lead to defects in the finished part. Closed-loop…

In this work, we propose an interesting combination of the Atwood machine and Galileo's inclined plane to study quantitatively kinematics with a smartphone and the phyphox app. For this purpose, we use the optical stopwatch function, based on the photosensor of the smartphone. The choice of phyphox app has some advantages for presenting the…

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…

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…