There are many reasons for exposing physics students to primary source material in the sciences. These works can illuminate the history of science and give students a more vivid picture of the development of physics than most textbooks attempt to provide. They can also serve as pedagogical tools for exploring the misconceptions and "wrong…

Three-dimensional printing was used to prepare a p-bonding model with embedded magnets. The model enables students to have a kinesthetic experience that simulates the energetics of bonding, antibonding, and nonbonding p-orbital interactions.

This paper describes a cost effective and safe device to perform realistic experiments on the physics of radioactivity in classrooms. It can be used to study both a- and ß-radioactivity as well as ?-emitters and shows extremely realistic behaviour. The device, in the form of a Geiger--Müller tube, was tested during a public lecture and it deceived…

Recently, infrared cameras have become available as smartphone accessories. Being less expensive than regular infrared cameras they are readily affordable for schools and many teachers may even privately own one due to their potential to visualize all kinds of thermal phenomena in physics teaching. Any science teacher who wants to use such a…

The smartphone's ambient light sensor has been used in the literature to study different physical phenomena. For instance, Malus's law, which involves the polarized light, has been verified by using simultaneously the orientation and light sensors of a smartphone. The illuminance of point light sources has been characterized also using the light…

This paper describes a pictorial approach to Lenz's law that involves following four steps and drawing three pictures to determine the direction of the current induced by a changing magnetic flux. Lenz's law accompanies Faraday's law, stating that, for a closed conducting loop, the induced emf (electromotive force) created by a changing magnetic…

The saga of the search for the ultimate constituents of matter has long been one of finding a seemingly fundamental structure that, in turn, was found to be made of even smaller building blocks. Matter is made of molecules. Molecules are in turn made of atoms, which are themselves made of electrons and atomic nuclei. The nucleus consists of…

This research reports on the effectiveness of Polya Problem-Solving and Target-Task collaborative learning approaches in electricity amongst high school physics students. It also includes a gender focus. It was an experimental research with a pre-test post-test control group design. The experimental groups were exposed to Polya Problem-Solving…

Scientific disciplines including mathematics, physics, and chemistry tend to adopt online resources, including websites and web applications, to demonstrate physical experiments and simulate scientific phenomena that are hard to observe and investigate in real world. The present study examined the existing collections of the websites and web…

Students in one-on-one tutoring learn best when tutors elicit their constructive responses to scaffold them. Tutors' non-eliciting explanations, in contrast, seem to be less beneficial for learning. Usually, tutors use less eliciting strategies than would be optimal. They, however, seem to use more eliciting in procedural domains (e.g.,…

In the paper, the results of a study into a problem of cognitive barriers (difficulties) related to the third component of a pedagogical triad "how to teach what to teach to how to be learned study" are reported. At the first stage, methodical approaches to academic performance rating for students learning mathematical and…

This paper discusses the use of a free mobile engineering application (app) called Autodesk® ForceEffect™ to provide students assistance with spatial visualization of forces and more practice in solving/visualizing statics problems compared to the traditional pencil-and-paper method. ForceEffect analyzes static rigid-body systems using free-body…

For years the fan cart has provided physics students with an excellent resource for exploring fundamental mechanics concepts such as acceleration, Newton's laws, impulse, momentum, work-energy, and energy conversions. "The Physics Teacher" has even seen some excellent do-it-yourself (DIY) fan carts and activities. If you are interested…

We present a comment on "Benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory electricity and magnetism course", by F. J. Kontur, K. de La Harpe, and N. B. Terry PRST-PER 11, 010105 (2015). Our data show that the conclusions Kontur and coworkers draw from their data may not be generally applicable.

The mechanics of a beam balance are little appreciated and seldom understood. We here consider the conditions that result in a stable balance, with center of gravity below the fulcrum (pivot point), while an unstable balance results when the center of gravity is above the fulcrum. The highly sensitive drinking-straw microbalance, which uses a…