Data analysis and interpretation has always played a fundamental role in the scientific curricula of high school students. The spread of digitalization has further increased the number of learning environments whereby this topic can be effectively taught: as a matter of fact, the ever-growing diffusion of data science across diverse sectors of…

The Arduino microcontroller is currently one of the favorite tools of makers, and many teachers have used it in teaching or experiments. In addition, light-emitting diode (LED) smart lighting is the worldwide trend in lighting. There are many teaching demonstrations or applications of color addition using LEDs. Furthermore, the Internet of Things…

Multiple initiatives contend that all students should master computational thinking, including the "Next Generation Science Standards, the K-12 Framework for Computational Thinking," and Code.org. In turn, many physics teachers have begun to explore a variety of approaches to integrating computational modeling through programming. These…

Newton's laws are a ubiquitous topic in introductory physics instruction. One common problem involves asking what will happen if you stick your finger into a cup of water sitting on a scale. A way to solve the problem would be to first recognize that the water exerts a buoyant force upward on the finger, which students can recognize as being the…

This article describes a simple way to introduce nanomaterials using the presence of carbon nanodots (CNDs) in widely available food. Budweiser® beer and Coca-Cola®, commercial foods that are commonly accessible, were utilized to demonstrate the optical property of nanoparticles. Specifically, green and violet laser pointers were employed for the…

In high school and elementary college physics labs the measurement of vertical distance is often required. Measuring the distance an object falls or the vertical displacement of springs in a Hooke's law experiment are commonplace. Determining these distances to perhaps a millimeter or two of precision is difficult without an expensive height gauge…

Learning to create, use, and evaluate models is a central element of becoming a scientist. In physics, we often begin an analysis of a complicated system with highly simplified or toy models. In introductory physics classes, we tend to use them without comment or motivation. Some students infer that physics is irrelevant to their understanding 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,…

The Ball Bearing High Voltage generator is a fairly simple and transparent apparatus that can serve as a tool to motivate conceptual descriptions and calculations in electrostatics that are normally presented to our students in a rather dry and matter-of-fact fashion. For example, instead of posing a problem in the typical textbook form of…

This article describes an activity appropriate for middle or high school physics or physical science students. Rather than giving the answer to the question "How does a milliliter compare to a cubic centimeter?" the students develop a procedure for measuring volume by calculation and by displacement of water. Students share the data and…

Many high schools, two-year colleges, and universities offer a conceptual physics course for non-science students who have to take a basic science course. The students often enter the course unmotivated and may eventually withdraw. So, how do we make the course interesting enough for these students to gain the knowledge we desire and, more…

In the spring of 2018 the Northern California/Nevada Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers was alerted to a local high school's plans to eliminate physics for the following school year. As part of the campaign to support the school's efforts to sustain physics in the following year, the physics offerings from the surrounding…

The lesson presented here provides a multifaceted inquiry-based opportunity to develop a deep grasp of Archimedes' principle. It was originally developed for high school teachers as part of their training in the basic structure of the Next Generation Science Standards. There are numerous demonstrations illustrating Archimedes' principle, many of…

In this article, we present a low-cost lab experience, enhanced by new technologies and easy to execute. The objective of the experiment is to explore the moment of inertia of a fidget spinner quantitatively. Our choice was to integrate the teaching of physics with the use of a popular toy, the fidget spinner, very popular among young people and…

We describe the design and manufacture of a classroom set of devices that simultaneously measures and records the resistivity of four conductive elements (superconductor, semiconductor, metal alloy, and pure metal) as a function of temperature. The unique nature of this multi-semester project was that these devices would be designed, machined and…