Students are better able to understand Newton's first law when they build from their own personal experiences of bicycling, skateboarding, or riding in a car. Most have experienced a tumble when their skateboard or bicycle comes to an abrupt stop. Alternately in a car, your body continues moving when the brakes are applied and you feel the force…

This paper introduces a reflective methodology of the body as a resource for reflective practice based on an analysis of my personal response and experience of autobiographical narrative. It offers an approach in which the movements and markings of the body serve as important sites for collecting additional evidence of the daily practices that…

An introduction to digital stochastic simulations for modeling a variety of physical and chemical processes is presented. Despite the importance of stochastic simulations in chemistry, the prevalence of turn-key software solutions can impose a layer of abstraction between the user and the underlying approach obscuring the methodology being…

Paul Hewitt's "Figuring Physics" in the Feb. 2016 issue asked whether it would take a larger velocity change to stop a satellite in a circular orbit or to cause it to escape. An extension of this problem asks: What "minimum" velocity change is required to crash a satellite into the planet, and how does that compare with the…

In sports, it is very common to see athletes performing jumps, where they impose rotations to their own bodies' elements and intentionally change their moment of inertia around the centre of mass (CM). When this occurs, weird effects are observed in the body's trajectories. In this work we study a jump called "Grand Jeté" of a ballerina,…

Past research suggests that speakers gesture more when motor simulations are more strongly activated. We investigate whether simulations of a perceptual nature also influence gesture production. Participants viewed animations of a spider moving with a manner of motion that was either highly salient (n = 29) or less salient (n = 31) and then…

Thermochromic paint can be made in the laboratory and used for temperature sensing by observation of colour changes. This can be illustrated by an improved method of showing comparative conductivity of heat by different materials, and an amusing method of indicating approximate temperatures of liquids in drinking glasses. The fabric Lycra, used to…

For more than 10 years, I had taught Kepler's laws and the law of universal gravity without a corresponding experiment. I sometimes remember how these topics were difficult for me in my high school days to understand. At that time, I thought that one of the reasons for my difficulty was that these phenomena cannot be visualized using physical…

Undergraduate lab design balances several factors: 1) simple experiments connected with learning objectives, 2) experiments sufficiently accurate for comparisons between theory and measurements without gaps when students ascribe discrepancies to confounding factors (imperfect simplifying assumptions, measurement uncertainties, and "human…

The internal sensors in smartphones for their advanced add-in functions have also paved the way for these gadgets becoming multifunctional tools in elementary experimental physics. For instance, the acceleration sensor has been used to analyze free-falling motion and to study the oscillations of a spring-mass system. The ambient light sensor on…

Developing self-regulation at an early age is important for children's success in school and in life. Self-regulation involves the ability to remember instructions, shift attention from one thing to another, and reduce the intensity and frequency of impulsive emotions and behaviors. "Red Light, Purple Light" is a preschool program that…

Mathematics is a particularly notable domain in which to understand the role of body movement for improving reasoning, instruction, and learning. One reason is that mathematics ideas are often expressed and taught through disembodied formalisms--diagrams and symbols that are culturally designed to be abstract, amodal, and arbitrary (Glenberg et…

This article focuses on the speculative practice of "study" in relation to movement pedagogies in early childhood physical education. Bringing the concept in conversation with movement pedagogies, we work to unsettle universalized approaches to early childhood physical education. We orient toward movement pedagogies that refuse the…

Cognitive and psychomotor are two aspects that play an important role in children's development, especially at the preschool age. This study aims to create and test products in the form of learning methods with song and movement to improve children's cognitive and psychomotor aspects. This research is a research and development using 4D theory…

Atypical motor development has frequently been reported in infants at elevated likelihood for autism spectrum disorder. However, no previous study has used detailed motion capture technology to compare infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder and infant siblings with no familial history of autism spectrum disorder. We investigated…