This article describes a general education course offering, Physics and the Arts. During the development of this course, physics and arts faculty collaborated closely. We cover the usual physics phenomena for such a course--light, color, and sound--in addition to gravity, equilibrium, and spacetime. Goals of the course are to increase students'…

Introduction: Interest in understanding the decline in positive attitudes to science and technology (S&T) among children and young people has led to numerous studies in recent years. Some research has focused on how personal characteristics of children and young people and other demographic and sociocultural factors influence the development…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways in which preservice elementary teacher candidates designed integrated reading and science lessons that evoked the use of similar cognitive skills in both subjects, such as sequencing, predicting, classifying, or noting cause and effect. The authors provided the candidates with a lesson plan…

We developed and implemented a series of workshops and seminars in an undergraduate journal club targeted at improving student development in applying the scientific process. Students were surveyed before and after participating in the club about their confidence in accessing, analyzing, and reporting scientific research. Post-club, the students…

Chemistry in high school is often presented as a jumbled mass of topics drawn from inorganic, analytical, and physical sub-disciplines. With no central theme to build on, students may have trouble grasping the chemical sciences as a coherent field. In this article, Stowe and Elvey describe an activity that integrates different facets of chemistry…

Building a robot from scratch in an educational context can be a challenging prospect. While a multitude of projects exist that simplify the electronics and software aspects of a robot, the same cannot be said for construction systems for robotics. In this paper, we present our efforts to create a low-cost do-it-yourself construction system for…

How can an engineer design a bird feeder that attracts many birds? This question resulted from kindergarten students' observations of the bird feeders in their school's bird sanctuary. The challenging question is the heart of project-based learning (PBL), a teaching strategy in which students tackle real-world problems and design projects to solve…

In a 2012 blog post, John Maeda discusses the idea that while science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education plays an important role in innovation, limitations exist when we focus exclusively on STEM. Maeda advocates for the addition of the "A" for Art to the acronym, insisting that the arts promote the creativity and…

This study describes the use of guided self-reflection and peer feedback activities to improve student oral communication in a large ChE class (n ~ 100) setting. Student performance tracked throughout an experimental semester indicated both reflection activities accelerated improvement in oral communication over control; student perception of the…

As a science leader in her school, the author is always looking for new and interesting ways to inspire children in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) subjects. Attending several science conferences introduced her to new STEM programs, such as Street Science and fractals. In this article, she shares a couple of the activities…

Pupils' questions can play a powerful role in helping them to develop conceptual understanding, but can also provide a stimulus for teacher learning. This article presents a series of stories that illustrate the challenges of capitalising on pupils' questions, given the complexity of decision-making required in the science classroom and the…

The Swedish school system offers curriculum-based early childhood education (ECE) organised as preschool (for 0-5-year-olds) and preschool class (for 6-year-olds). The intention to create a playful and educational environment based on children's perspectives, interests, and questions is strongly based on historical and cultural traditions. This…

Three hundred and forty-one children (M[subscript age] = 9,0 years) engaged in a series of science tasks in collaborative, same-sex pairs or did not interact. All children who collaborated on the science tasks advanced in basic-level understanding of the relevant task (motion down an incline). However, only boys advanced in their conceptual…

We describe a mobile augmented reality (AR) experience called Atom Tracker designed to help middle school students better understand the cycling of matter in ecosystems with a focus on the concept of conservation of matter and the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. Location-based AR allows students to locate virtual "hotspots,"…

One of the standards for life science addressed in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) is "Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics" (HS-LS2). A critical concept included in this core idea is biodiversity. To show competency, students are expected to design investigations, collect data, and…