Dark matter comprises most of the matter in the universe, yet physicists are unsure of its nature. A significant effort is devoted in contemporary research to attempts to understand dark matter, making it a both captivating and relevant area of astrophysics to discuss in a classroom setting. What is more, the physics behind these experiments is…

Informal physics programs bring physicists together with youth and adults from local communities to engage with physics content outside of classroom settings. These public engagement or "physics outreach" programs are a significant endeavor of the physics community; however, we lack a systemic documentation of these efforts, which makes…

This paper provides a historical review of the interview research that has been used by science educators to investigate children's basic astronomy knowledge. A wide range of strategies have been developed over the last 120 years or so as successive teams of researchers have endeavoured to overcome the methodological difficulties that have arisen.…

While teaching his first-ever introductory college astronomy course, I heard a graduate student make the comment that compared to other areas of astronomy, studying the solar system is just "stamp collecting." Coverage of the solar system in an introductory college astronomy course certainly "could" consist mostly of showing…

Teaching and learning situations nowadays typically build on richly illustrated material or multimodal presentations. Under these circumstances, the transparency of images and models used for explaining various phenomena becomes central. The present study deals with 20 Swedish children, 9-12 years old, discussing an illustration meant to show the…

The upcoming Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, with its 70-mile wide path of totality stretching across much of North America, provides us with a unique opportunity to teach students about eclipses. One might naturally assume that students have little difficulty understanding the nature of eclipses. After all, the notion that eclipses occur when…

The damped harmonic oscillator physics problem is a standard oscillation problem in calculus physics for pre-engineering students in a community college. The use of alternative linear algebra eigenvalue stability method is consistent with the upper engineering courses using control theory. The external force and friction damping would become the…

Based on the results of an online survey of 500 Québec's elementary (K-6) teachers conducted in 2015 that probed the way respondents teach astronomy to their classrooms, their background in S&T, their pre-service education, their aims and goals for astronomy teaching, their attitude toward teaching astronomy, the resources and materials they…

Incandescent lamps are not only good sources of electromagnetic energy radiations but their operating temperatures are comparable to the temperatures of stars also. These features can be exploited to teach apparent magnitude scale both theoretically and experimentally. The numerical illustrations presented corresponding to 10, 100, 1000 and 10 000…

In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote a brief article where he suggested the possibility that a massive object acted as a lens, amplifying the brightness of a star. As time went by, this phenomenon--known as gravitational lensing--has become a powerful research tool in astrophysics. The simplest and symmetrical expression of a gravitational lens is known…

Our students built a full-size, mobile planetarium in three weeks. The planetarium was built with commonly available, cheap construction materials. Our priorities were mobility, possibility of quick assembly and reassembly and the students' availability of materials in every place in the world. The students calculated all the parameters of the…

Discovery of planets outside our solar system, known as extra-solar planets or exoplanets for short, has been at the forefront of astronomical research for over 25 years. Reports of new discoveries have almost become routine; however, the excitement surrounding them has not. Amazingly, as groundbreaking as exoplanet science is, the basic physics…

The planets in our solar system are remarkable and captivating objects for beginning astronomers to study. While merely observing the planets is fairly easy, it can be difficult to capture the high-quality images beginners hope for. The methods used for deep-sky astrophotography are optimized for dim, fairly large objects using large apertures and…

The author, a mathematics teacher, describes a seventh grade class where students use scientific notation to calculate how long it takes light to travel a variety of astronomical distances and then interpret the significance of their findings. Ultimately, the goal is to have students see how calculations can help answer large, almost philosophical…

This research examined articles about models and modelling in the context of science education in Turkey by using content analysis method. Two specific academic databases; one of which was Dergipark, a platform including the academic journals published in Turkey, and Scholar Google were examined in detail so that totally 71 articles on models and…