As students learn physics, they are often required to reason about the behavior of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena, and to synthesize prior knowledge from several different areas of physics to construct understanding of new ideas. This can be a tremendously difficult cognitive task for novice students, especially when the unfamiliar…

Educators have found that kinesthetic involvement in an experiment or demonstration can engage students in a powerful way. With that as our goal, we developed three activities that allow students to connect with and quantitatively explore key physics principles from mechanics with three fun physical challenges. By presenting these activities as…

Creating investigations that allow students to see physics in their everyday world and to be kinesthetically active outside of the traditional physics classroom can be incredibly engaging and effective. The investigations we developed were inquiry investigations in which students engaged in concrete experiences before we discussed the abstract…