We report an educational tool for the upper level undergraduate quantum chemistry or quantum physics course that uses a symbolic approach via the PySyComp Python library. The tool covers both time-independent and time-dependent quantum chemistry, with the latter rarely considered in the foundations course due to topic complexity. We use quantized…

Computational thinking in the educational environment has awaken a rising interest, having been included as part of the curricula from the very beginnings of education. Programmable robots have become a valuable positive resource in order to succeed in the development of computational thinking, demanding proper training from kindergarten teachers…

An important step in learning to use math in science is learning to see symbolic equations not just as calculational tools, but as ways of expressing fundamental relationships among physical quantities, of coding conceptual information, and of organizing physics knowledge structures. In this paper, I propose "anchor equations" as a…

The purpose of the study is to investigate the elementary education undergraduate students' understanding levels of one dimensional motion which they take in the compulsory general physics course in the second year, third term and instructors' predictions about the students' responses. The study is a descriptive study. The data of the study were…

The problem of determining the angle ? at which a point mass launched from ground level with a given speed v[subscript 0] will reach a maximum distance is a standard exercise in mechanics. There are many possible ways of solving this problem, leading to the well-known answer of ? = p/4, producing a maximum range of D[subscript max] = v[superscript…

Southern Cross University (SCU) educators and local teachers have developed a five-lesson instructional sequence built around fluke identification as a way of resolving the question: How fast do humpback whales travel up the east coast of Australia?

The following kinematics problem was given to several students as a project in conjunction with a first-semester calculus-based physics course. The students were asked to keep a journal of all their work and were encouraged to keep even their scrap paper. The goal of the project was to expose the students to the process of doing theoretical…

The use of collaborative problem solving within mathematics education is imperative in this day and age of integrative science. The formation of interdisciplinary teams of mathematicians and scientists to investigate crucial problems is on the rise, as greater insight can be gained from an interdisciplinary perspective. Mathematical modelling, in…

We examine a generalization of the one-dimensional Ising model involving interactions among neighbourhoods of "k" adjacent spins. The model is solved by exploiting a connection to an interesting computational problem that we call ""k"-SAT on a ring", and is shown to be equivalent to the nearest-neighbour Ising model in the absence of an external…

When thinking of models for sinusoidal waves, examples such as tides of the ocean, daily temperatures for one year in your town, light and sound waves, and certain types of motion are used. Many textbooks [1, p. 222] also present a "Ferris wheel description problem" for students to work. This activity takes the Ferris wheel problem out of the…

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM's) (2000) Connections Standard states that students should "recognize and use connections among mathematical ideas; understand how mathematical ideas interconnect ...; [and] recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics" (p. 354). This article presents an in-depth…

This paper outlines the solution that the Team of Austria found to problem number 7, "skateboarder", presented in the finals of the 22nd International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) in Tianjin, China. We investigated how a skateboarder can accelerate from rest on a horizontal surface without touching an external support. The focus was laid on…

A pendulum with periodically varying length is an interesting physical system. It has been studied by some researchers using traditional perturbation methods (for example, the averaging method). But due to the limitation of the conventional perturbation methods, the solutions are not valid for long-term prediction of the pendulum. In this paper,…

This paper enlarges the reservoir of solved tutor problems in non-holonomic mechanics at the undergraduate level of physics education. Unlike other, rather artificial, solved problems typically used, the streetboard-rider locomotion problem presented here represents an appealing contemporary real-world problem with interesting applications in a…

The bicycle provides a context-rich problem accessible to students in a first-year physics course, encircling several core physics principles such as conservation of total energy and angular momentum, dissipative forces, and vectors. In this article, I develop a simple numerical model that can be used by any first-year physics student to…