Difficulties presented by students on the concept of instantaneous velocity are well known. This is in part due to instantaneous speed being often defined in terms of the notion of mathematical limit, which may not be clear to many students in introductory physics courses. In this work we present a complementary teaching proposal that can help…

It is often necessary to enrich the teaching environment in order for students to learn optics in depth and to interpret the real optical situations with the information they have learned. In this study, a virtual teaching environment was developed using by Algodoo, a 2D simulation software. An eye model was created in order to explain the…

We report on the study of student difficulties regarding a heat engine in the context of a Stirling cycle by the method of measurement. An in-class test about a Stirling engine with a regenerator was taken by three classes, and the students were asked to perform one of the most basic activities--calculate the efficiency of the heat engine. Our…

Understanding simple electric DC circuits often represents a great challenge to many students in lower secondary schools. As a result, students' knowledge of this subject is often dominated by alternative conceptions, even after instruction. One of the reasons for these learning difficulties is the intangibility of key physical quantities and…

The difficulties students have in blending mathematics and physics are here analyzed, by focusing on the issue of a convergent series. We present an experimental and a theoretical analysis of some phenomena which can be investigated employing series, as the bouncing marble and Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the turtle. Measurements were carried…

The Standard Model of particle physics is one of the most successful theories in physics and describes the fundamental interactions between elementary particles. It is encoded in a compact description, the so-called "Lagrangian," which even fits on t-shirts and coffee mugs. This mathematical formulation, however, is complex and only…

This study compares synchronous versus asynchronous online teaching in an introductory calculus-based physics class. Like many schools, our institution transitioned to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. We held optional synchronous online sessions during the original class time, and approximately half of our students were regular…

In this paper a sequence of nine, easy to manufacture optical black-box experiments with increasing levels of difficulty, and supportive frameworks for physics classes are introduced. They have been evaluated in a lower-secondary school at the end of optics lessons. A black-box is a kind of experimental task where the inner structure is not…

Several studies show that students experience more and more difficulties managing the measurements of electrical values in alternating current and that they have trouble making links between theory and practice. They find it difficult to give meaning to root mean square (RMS; or effective) values, which are not understood as average values and are…

This paper deals with the nature and the level of difficulty of teaching and learning physics in the first year of undergraduate engineering schools in France. Our case study is based on a survey regarding a classic and basic question in applied physics, and which was conducted with a group of second-year students in a post-baccalaureate 1…

People usually talk about "hot and cold" colours without really thinking of the impact these definitions may have on scientific understanding. These colours are associated with the human sensations of hot and cold, and this idea is consistent with commonsense and daily experience. Interacting with students, we detect conceptual conflicts when they…

The persistence of students' misconceptions about motion illustrates the enormous difficulty that teachers face in their attempts to overcome these with traditional physics instruction. An understanding of students' ideas about motion and ways to incorporate them into successful instructional approaches can be obtained from an analysis of…