The present study focuses on the assessment of summer robotics camp designed for 7th grade students who were supposed to work on a STEM-related problem through modeling and design activities. It was exclusively investigated the effects of these activities on the STEM-related career interests and knowledge structures of students. The students were…

The purpose of this study was to provide an online astronomy activity using the Stellarium program as a virtual planetarium. The implementation was conducted with 30 preservice primary school teachers (PPTs) who participated in a non-formal workshop that included interactive, technology-based astronomy practices embedded with the…

It is a fact that personal features and qualities play a crucial role in determining learners' success or failure in their attempt to learn foreign languages. It was these factors that lit a bulb in the mind and opened a path to set off to find out how these features affected the learners' communication eagerness in L2. The main aim of the current…

Strong spatial skills are foundational in predicting students' performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. Decades of research have considered the relationship between thinking spatially and how scientists reason and solve problems. However, few studies have examined the factors that influence improvement in…

This paper suggests possible futures for astronomy activities in a post-COVID environment. A corpus of video recordings of astronomy education sessions held in different settings allowed the authors to analyse how sessions are achieved, with inclusive focus on the astronomers, the public attending sessions, and people looking through telescopes.…

Few laboratory exercises exist that introduce undergraduate students to both the concepts and instrumentation used in rotational spectroscopy. Because of this gap in undergraduate laboratory training, a teaching laboratory for the pure rotational spectroscopy of benzonitrile has been developed and reported. Owing to benzonitrile's recent discovery…

As a result of the spread of COVID-19 during spring 2020, many colleges and universities across the U.S., and beyond, were compelled to move entirely to remote, online instruction, or shut down. Due to the rapidity of this transition, instructors had to significantly--if not completely--change their instructional style on very short notice. Our…

A working knowledge of Artificial Neural Networks is rapidly becoming critical for navigating the modern world. Although the last few years have seen an explosion of the use of these tools in research, and there are many do-it-yourself articles on the web, they have not yet filtered down to wide implementation in introductory courses. I report…

In this commentary, summarized from a recent interview, the author reminisces about a career dedicated to critical exploration in the classroom. She discusses the formation of the Moon Group, a group of teachers who met over a period of 25 years to study the behaviour of the moon. Duckworth later describes an exercise in which her students…

Many introductory astronomy courses include concepts related to basic stellar properties. In general, these are concepts that originate from the human perception of starlight. This observational aspect is not easy to incorporate in the classroom. We explore if these concepts could be developed using the built-in data in a planetarium software.…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe the design and user testing of GeoForge, a multiple-player digital learning experience for middle school that leverages virtual reality (VR) and individualized websites for learning concepts in planetary science. This paper investigates how specific instructional design choices and features of the technology…

In 1974, Stephen Hawking theoretically discovered that black holes emit thermal radiation and have a characteristic temperature, known as the "Hawking temperature." The aim of this paper is to present a simple heuristic derivation of the Hawking temperature, based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The result obtained coincides…

Immersive technologies have the potential to play unique roles in the collaborative problem-solving process. To advance research in these contexts, new methods of documenting group collaboration with technology are necessary. The goal of this paper is to develop and utilize a coding scheme that enables investigation of the nature of collaborative…

This research focuses on the experiences of six undergraduate white women who are physics and astronomy majors. Specifically we conducted semistructured, empathetic interviews that reveal how uncomfortable physics environments inside and outside of the classroom, which were often propagated by male instructors and peers, excluded undergraduate…

A primary goal of general education introductory astronomy courses often is to provide students with examples of how science is actually done. Low to nonexistent mathematical prerequisites in some courses can make useful exercises difficult to find, and sometimes very difficult for students, especially if the exercises feature quantitative…