This is potentially the first study that addressed the Puerto Rican high school students' chemistry knowledge acquisition using traditional teaching and Physics Education Technology. The problem addressed by this quantitative comparative quasi-experimental study was that students' showed a disadvantage on chemistry knowledge acquisition over other…

Seeking to foster the learning process and encourage the active participation of undergraduate students, this work proposes a new methodology that involves integrating smartphones into the learning process under a simple and accessible approach to learning in Chemistry and Physics laboratories aiming at facilitating the learning of some chemical…

In the modern and exciting world of particle physics, in which scientists talk of Higgs bosons and supersymmetry, it would be natural for someone to dismiss the common proton as a particle too pedestrian to be interesting. Yet in the centennial year of the announcement of its discovery, studies of the humble nucleus of the hydrogen atom continue…

Fernández-Chapou and colleagues analyzed projectile trajectories and showed an elliptic property hidden in them. For that analysis, they considered projectiles shot from a point with a common value of speed and different angles of projection. Such projectile paths exhibit some interesting characteristics. For example, pairs of projectiles with…

A power supply is needed to maintain the function of a computer, heat is needed to keep food from cooling down, and a force is needed to maintain motion. Those are notions that seem very natural to many people as they are based on everyday experiences. However, when it comes to motion, it is not force that maintains motion but momentum. Students…

Interaction forces between magnetic fields and current loops play a central role in the theory of magnetism. This work describes a reasonably simple and cheap experiment for demonstrating this issue: the force on a thin coil due to a nearby cylindrical magnet. The magnitude of the force as well as its attractive/repulsive character is comfortably…

A recent physics challenge shows a circuit, where a voltmeter is connected in series. Indeed, real voltmeters have finite input resistance, therefore, one may think that they can be used as resistors. In addition, voltmeters measure the voltage difference between their terminals, so it seems to be possible to calculate the current flowing through…

Conceptual inventory surveys are routinely used in education research to identify student learning needs and assess instructional practices. Students might not fully engage with these instruments because of the low stakes attached to them. This paper explores tests that can be used to estimate the percentage of students in a population who might…

In 2018, we celebrated the sesquicentennial birthday of Robert A. Millikan, a Nobel laureate in physics who worked among the greats such as Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. His name, however, is perhaps not as widely known. He was born in 1868 in Morrison, Illinois, and moved with his family to the small town of Maquoketa, Iowa, at age nine. It was…

Additive colors are interesting to young students. In this paper, we show a convenient and straightforward method to demonstrate this phenomenon by projector. It produces defocus blur and reduces imaging quality for color mixing. We believe this demonstration experiment can be performed in most classrooms.

The Gaussian gun is an arrangement of magnets and ball bearings (pictured in Fig. 1) such that--when the leftmost ball is released--the rightmost ball is ejected at high speeds. The device has been described in several articles on energy education. The sudden appearance of kinetic energy offers a productive context for considering a range of…

A discussion of audio tones in the physics classroom will include mention of their frequency. The frequency of a periodic signal is a well-defined quantity that can readily be measured. A concept related to frequency is that of pitch. Pitch is a perceived quantity that cannot be measured directly and is most important when listeners characterize…

When a ball bounces obliquely on a horizontal surface, the bottom of the ball stretches horizontally and then vibrates backward. The resulting ball spin depends sensitively on the transverse vibration frequency. A simple model is presented to describe the effect, showing how the stored elastic energy can result in additional spin.

This January marked the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. On Jan. 27, 1967, the interior of NASA's AS-204 command module (CM), occupied by American astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Ed White, caught fire during a rehearsal of its scheduled Feb. 21 launch. By the time the ground crew was able to open the hatch, the…

As a boy I spent many hours skipping stones across the surface of the water on the shore of Lake Michigan. The challenge was to get as many skips or as much distance as possible. Zero skips was a bust. One or two skips was disappointing, three or four skips was mediocre, and six or more skips was exhilarating. The angle of the stone with respect…