The need to integrate computation into the physics curriculum has long been established: using simulations and computational modeling can enhance students' conceptual understanding, and the computational skills students acquire are both useful and necessary in their careers. However, making changes to an established physics course is a challenge…

Most springs do not simply obey Hooke's law because they are constructed to have an initial tension, which must be overcome before normal elongation occurs. This property, well known to engineers, is universally neglected in elementary physics courses. In particular, the standard simple harmonic motion experiment omits any discussion of this…

The pendulum has a great relevance in physics and it has been explored in educational papers from many theoretical or experimental points of view (see, for example, Refs. 1-12 and references therein). Here a method for the measurement of the gravitational acceleration with a large number of trials is presented; we assume that the systematic errors…

At some point in the future, if mankind hopes to settle planets outside our solar system, it will be crucial to determine the range of planetary conditions under which human beings could survive and function. In this article, we apply physical considerations to determine the limitations that gravity imposes on several systems governing the human…

The purpose of this study was to determine the description of the process carried out in the physics education study program on the lens material. The process skills used in this study are the methods used, namely measurement, measurement and measurement processes which consist of table data, data, and training, conducting experiments. Total…

The conservation law of energy and momentum can be examined and demonstrated by a well-known collision experiment. In this experiment, several identical elastic balls are suspended from a horizontal frame. When the ball at one end is pulled aside and released, thus allowing it to swing like a pendulum, it hits the next ball. The outcome is…

This paper describes a simple and effective trick with a ball on a flat surface. The trick does not require any skills, is surprising and can provide an attention-grabbing, fun introduction for high school students into the topic of pure rolling motion versus rolling with slipping.

Analysis of collisions is standardly included in the introductory physics course. In one dimension (1D), there do not seem to be any unusual issues: Typically, the initial velocities of the two colliding objects are specified, and the problem is to find the final velocities. In 1D there are therefore two unknown variables. One can write the…

In recent years, smartphone sensors have been frequently used in educational demonstrations to improve students' understanding of certain physical kinematic topics. In particular, the sensors on modern smartphones enable students to use their phones as physics mini-laboratories, and they have been used to analyze objects' speeds and accelerations…

Background: While there has been increasing recognition of the importance of attending to students' views about what counts as knowing and learning a STEM field, surveys that measure these "epistemological" beliefs are often used in ways that implicitly assume the fields, e.g., "physics," to be a single domain about which…

The conical pendulum is a topic theoretically approached in physics literature, but with little experimental activity developed due to the difficulty of reproducing the conical motion in ideal experimental conditions. This work consisted of studying the motion of a rigid conical pendulum using video analysis. The experimental results were used as…

This study aims to measure Brewster's angle of glass and acrylic brick with an easy-to-obtain mobile application (app) by changing the tungsten light source to a red laser. The popularization of the smartphone has inspired many to use its various built-in sensors to carry out general physics experiments. Many others have adopted both a laser and a…

Observing children tossing a ball in a game of catch or pumping their legs to move a swing, it is obvious that they have already experienced and learned to control the basics of pushes and pulls. Through everyday experiences as simple as rolling a ball across the floor, to more complex activities like team sports, children are building a…

In a classical electronic laboratory, there is an experiment where a diode is connected in a series with a resistor and a variable DC voltage source in order to draw the characteristic I-V curve of the diode. Input voltage is gradually increased starting from 0 V, and the potential difference between the diode's terminals is read by using a…

After targeted instruction designed to improve student conceptual understanding of physics, a significant fraction of students are not able to answer many questions in a consistent manner. Prior research suggests that even those students who demonstrate that they acquired the relevant knowledge and skills (i.e., possess the requisite…