The advent of new educational technologies has stimulated interest in using online videos to deliver content in university courses. We examined student engagement with 78 online videos that we created and were incorporated into a one-semester flipped introductory mechanics course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We found that students were…

Improving students' understanding of the nature of experimental physics is often an explicit or implicit goal of undergraduate laboratory physics courses. However, lab activities in traditional lab courses are typically characterized by highly structured, guided labs that often do not require or encourage students to engage authentically in the…

Lab activities are an important element of an undergraduate physics course. In these lab activities, students construct and interpret graphs in order to connect the procedures of the lab with an understanding of the related physics concepts. This study investigated undergraduate students' construction and interpretation of graphs with best-fit…

The science education literature shows that students have difficulty understanding what causes the seasons. Incorrect explanations are often due to a lack of knowledge about the physical mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. To address this, we present a module in which the students engage in quantitative measurements with a photovoltaic panel to…

The purpose of this research was to examine and compare the effect of teaching the brightness of lamps, which is a topic for grade 11 physics lesson, on student achievement and attitude according to the 5E model belonging to the constructivist learning theory and the traditional teaching method. The research was conducted on 62 11th grade students…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether participation in sensorimotor activities by preschool children involving their own bodily balance while walking on a beam over the floor has an effect on their understanding of the mechanical equilibrium of a balance beam. The balance beam consisted of a horizontal stick balancing around its…

In this paper, a simple MATLAB-based PC program that enables the computer to function as a replacement for the electronic scalar-counter system associated with a Geiger-Muller (GM) tube is described. The program utilizes the ability of MATLAB to acquire data directly from the computer sound card. The signal from the GM tube is applied to the…

Interest in physics and chemistry topics and out-of-school experiences of Finnish secondary school students (n = 3626, median age 15) were surveyed using the international ROSE questionnaire. Based on explorative factor analysis the scores of six out-of-school experience factors (indicating how often students had done something outside of school)…

A model of Brownian motion is discussed which includes viscosity effects. The model lends itself to Monte Carlo simulation and thus is suitable for an elementary physics laboratory experiment. (BB)

Presents an outdoor experiment to measure the speed of sound as a classroom experience to begin the teaching year. Measures the delay time from seeing and hearing crashing cymbals across a field to calculate the speed. Exposes students to experimental uncertainties and limits of uncertainty in measurement. (MDH)

Discussed are experiments that may be done using a microcomputer to analyze scattering data. Apparatus assembly, procedures, and results for this activity are presented. (CW)

Describes two simple methods of error analysis: (1) combining errors in the measured quantities; and (2) calculating the error or uncertainty in the slope of a straight-line graph. Discusses significance of the error in the comparison of experimental results with some known value. (MDH)