The notion of scientific visual literacy has been advocated in recent science curriculum reform documents and related learning outcomes are expected from students. However, few studies have been conducted to determine how it is tested in high-stakes examinations. This study utilized the Visualization Blooming Tool to examine the level of visual…

Dark matter is one of the most intriguing scientific mysteries of our time and offers exciting instructional opportunities for physics education in high schools. The topic is likely to engage and motivate students in the classroom and allows addressing open questions of the Standard Model of particle physics. Although the empirical evidence of…

A ball at rest on a surface can be made to bounce up by pushing it down then releasing the downward force as fast as possible. Measurements and calculations are presented to show how it can best be done.

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…

The infrared camera, or thermal imaging camera, can be used to complement the teaching of a number of topics in high school science. Here, we provide seven examples of its application in teaching physics, chemistry and biology concepts at high school level. We also discuss its strengths for such applications and provide some pointers for science…

The specialised uses of solid angles mean that they are quite unfamiliar quantities. This article, apart from making solid angles a little more familiar, brings out several topics of general interest, such as how units are interrelated and how equations depend on the choice of units. Although the steradian is commonly used as the unit for solid…

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…

The aim of this study is to find out the effects of micro-reflective teaching practices on the professional skill development of pre-service physics teachers. It was planned as an experimental study with one group pretestposttest and supported by the case study method. The data were collected by using professional skill scale, observation form and…

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…

Computational thinking--a set of mental and cognitive tools applied to problem solving--is a fundamental skill that all of us (and not just computer scientists) draw on. Educators have found that computational thinking enhances learning across a range of subjects and reinforces students' abilities in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This book…

This paper describes a high school or introductory university course in scientific programming that introduces the computer revolution into the physics curriculum at the beginning. In the first one-hour lecture, Euler's method is presented and used to compute a solution to the analytically unsolvable two-body problem. In the remainder of the…

Newton's law of universal gravitation underpins our understanding of the dynamics of the Solar System and of a good portion of the observable universe. Generally, in the classroom or in textbooks, the law is presented initially in a qualitative way and at some point during the exposition its mathematical formulation is written on the blackboard…

The present paper accounts for progress in physics teaching in the sense that a problem, which has been closed to students for being too difficult, is gained for the high school curriculum. This problem is the compound Atwood machine with three bodies. Its introduction into high school classes is based on a recent study on the weighing of an…

Several suggestions for the use of Mobile Phone (MP) sensors in science teaching are found in the literature, and most of them focus on proposing physics experiments that can be conducted with the aid of the sensors that commonly exist in smartphones. The proposed experiments rely on the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) approach, that is, students…

Currently, the number of smartphones with an embedded gyroscope sensor has been increasing due games whose performance relies on 3D augmented reality. In general, teaching papers on the gyroscope sensor address very simple spatial configuration, where the fixed rotation axis coincides to the z-axis of the smartphone. This work presents five…