The author has found over her 13 years of teaching that starting off the school year with a science investigation has been a great method to learn about her students, to engage them about science before the school year even starts, and to build a foundation for a year of engaging science experiences. This article describes four such activities…

Early childhood educators contribute to the good health of their students every day. By telling students, "Wash your hands" and "Eat your healthy food first," and providing them time to develop gross motor skills through active play outdoors, teachers hope that students will take the advice with them on the way to a healthy and active lifestyle.…

The ability to correctly identify the greenest of several syntheses is a particularly useful asset for young chemists in the growing green economy. The famous univariate metrics atom economy and environmental factor provide insufficient information to allow for a proper selection of a green process. Multivariate metrics, such as those used in…

Reaction time, the time between a stimulus and a person's reaction to it, is a concept familiar to most teenagers, particularly in the context of driving. We describe a simple inexpensive activity that utilizes students' creativity and invokes the scientific method in order to explore reaction time. The goal of the activity is to give students a…

The dread of summer learning loss that students experience make the approaching months of summer bittersweet. Although teachers may not be able to guarantee that students retain the specifics of their science lessons, they can begin taking steps now that can help science inquiry remain at the forefront of their minds during the break. A year-long…

A bunny rabbit playfully hops across the wall. Then hands realign and fingers shift to make a hawk soar toward the ceiling. Most children have enjoyed the delightful experience of playing with shadow puppets. The authors build on this natural curiosity to help students link shadows to complex astronomical concepts such as seasons. The…

There are many ways in which wire coat hangers can be used other than for suspending clothes. The author has been making use of them in his teaching for many years--copying ideas from colleagues and creating some for himself. In this article, he shares five examples that can enrich learning about science. (Contains 6 figures.)

Demonstrating probabilistic outcomes using real-time data is especially well-suited to larger lecture classes where one can generate large data sets easily. The difficulty comes in quickly collecting, analyzing, and displaying the information. With the advent of wireless polling technology (clickers), this difficulty is removed. In this paper we…

Sports are a popular and effective way to illustrate physics principles. Baseball in particular presents a number of opportunities to motivate student interest and teach concepts. Several articles have appeared in this journal on this topic, illustrating a wide variety of areas of physics. In addition, several websites and an entire book are…

Introductory textbooks in solid state physics usually present the hydrogenic impurity model to calculate the energy of carriers bound to donors or acceptors in semiconductors. This model treats the pure semiconductor as a homogeneous medium and the impurity is represented as a fixed point charge. This approach is only valid for shallow impurities…

The author has successfully used a learning activity titled "The Year I Was Born" to motivate students to conduct historical research and present key scientific discoveries from their birth year. The activity promotes writing, helps students enhance their scientific literacy, and also improves their attitude toward the learning of science. As one…

This study explores teachers' thinking about practical work, especially in regards to the types of practical work they privilege in their teaching of chemistry to support students in their learning. It seeks to investigate the view that practical work, especially the type of practical work selected, is "unthinkingly" and…

Introducing students to a multidisciplinary research laboratory presents challenges in terms of learning specific technical skills and concepts but also with respect to integrating different technical elements to form a coherent picture of the research. Here we present a multidisciplinary series of experiments we have developed in the Electronic,…

In our science for non-science majors course "21st Century Physics," we investigate modern "Hubble plots" (plots of velocity versus distance for deep space objects) in order to discuss the Big Bang, dark matter, and dark energy. There are two potential challenges that our students face when encountering these topics for the…

Ask many elementary school teachers or principals, and they will say that science and music are not the top priority in their classrooms. Teachers need to know "how" they can incorporate the necessary mathematics and reading goals and objectives while still engaging students in the critical and aesthetic thinking developed through…