This paper presents protests from academically successful students who privately conveyed to the researchers their feelings of personal discontent with schools. The criterion to select this "sample" was that these students, dissatisfied with school but having good marks, would reveal what others, academically less successful, could not…

The paper discusses how a teaching approach, "interdisciplinary design and invention pedagogy," affected primary school student teachers' learning outcomes through the craft design process in pre-service teacher education. This study applies developmental work research (Engeström in J Educ Work 14(1):133-156, 2001; Engeström in…

In this study, a sociocultural perspective was adopted to understand the interplay between identity and agency in a context of science education reform in China. The manifestation of agency and the interaction between identity and agency were examined with two beginning science teachers teaching with practical work in high school. As part of this…

In educational research, it is well-known that collaborative work on core conceptual issues in physics leads to significant improvements in students' conceptual understanding. In this paper, we explore collaborative learning in action, adding to previous research in engineering education with a specific focus on the students' use of free body…

Much of the mathematical reasoning employed in the typical introductory physics course can be traced to Pythagorean roots planted over two thousand years ago. Besides obvious examples involving the Pythagorean theorem, I draw attention to standard physics problems and derivations which often unknowingly rely upon the Pythagoreans' work on…

Asteroids are clumps of rock, the sizes of which range from less than a kilometer to a few hundred kilometers in diameter. They are generally found in the unusually large gap between Mars and Jupiter. There are probably more than 40,000 asteroids in this gap called the "asteroid belt." In this paper we describe our efforts in confirming…

The mathematics behind Inge Lehmann's discovery that the inner core of the Earth is solid is explained using data collected around the Earth on seismic waves and their travel time through the Earth.

Many years ago I saw a picture of a huge set of wheels that was used to remove tree stumps during the construction of the Erie Canal (1817-1825) and was intrigued by its use of leverage, mechanical advantage, and torque. Figure 1 is a scale model of the device based on my memory of the (lost) picture and published accounts.

"What would you see if you were riding a beam of light?" This thought experiment, which Einstein reports to have "conducted" at the age of 16, of course has no sensible answer: as Einstein published a decade later, you could never reach the speed of light. But it does make sense to ask what you would see if you were traveling…

This is paper #3 in a series of four papers on "vacuum energy" and inflation. In paper #1 [see EJ1024183] we discussed an example of what we have been calling vacuum energy. It is an energy with negative pressure whose energy density remains constant in an expanding space. We showed that an energy density with these properties exists…

A goldfish isn't always visible inside its fishbowl. If the fish gets sufficiently close to the bowl glass, it will disappear for certain angles of observation. In a recent paper in this journal, Zhu and Shi explained the effect in terms of total internal reflection. We show in what follows that the phenomenon involves some richer optics: a…

The equation describing the magnetic field due to a single, nonrelativistic charged particle moving at constant velocity is often referred to as the "Biot-Savart law for a point charge." Introductory calculus-based physics books usually state this law without proof. Advanced texts often present it either without proof or as a special…

After half a century of waiting, the drama was intense. Physicists slept overnight outside the auditorium to get seats for the seminar at the CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland. Ten thousand miles away on the other side of the planet, at the world's most prestigious international particle physics conference, hundreds of physicists from every corner…

Tuning forks are wonderful tools for teaching physics. Every physics classroom should have several and every physics student should be taught how to use them. In this article, I highlight 10 enriching demonstrations that most teachers might not know, as well as provide tips to enhance the demonstrations teachers might already be doing. Some of…

This paper reports on an analyis of data from a novel "Peer Instruction" application, named DALITE. The Peer Instruction paradigm is well suited to take advantage of peer-input in web-based learning environments. DALITE implements an asynchronous instantiation of peer instruction: after submitting their answer to a multiple-choice…