Within the discussion of the development of commonsense theories of motion, recent research has established that throughout middle childhood, reasoning about motion down inclines changes with increasing age. To investigate this shift in more detail, this study investigated 5- to 11-year-old children's understanding of motion down curved slopes,…

Engaging key stakeholders, including students into the process of school-based physical activity (PA) intervention planning is considered important. The present study was part of the preparatory phase of the Estonian Schools in Motion pilot programme and aimed to examine students' perspective of PA opportunities in the classroom. Based on 17 focus…

Traditional school laboratory exercises on a system of moving objects connected by strings involve deriving expressions for the system acceleration, a = (?F)/m, and sketching a graph of acceleration vs. force. While being in the form of rational functions, these expressions present great opportunities for broadening the scope of the analysis by…

A novel method of measuring the coefficients of kinetic and rolling friction is proposed. The method is simple to implement and reliable. Samples of measurements and calculations are presented.

A simple throwing task is described to illustrate various aspects of projectile motion. The task was to throw a tennis ball in a waste paper bin about 2 m away. Success depends on skill, but it also depends on the physics of the problem. If the ball is thrown underarm, then success depends primarily on the throw speed, which must be controlled to…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of biomechanic factors to teach different hook punches in boxing. Eight light middleweight boxing athletes (mean age ± SD 19.00 ± 2.00 yrs, mean height ± SD 173.88 ± 3.89 cm, mean weight ± SD 64.25 ± 4.66 kg) participated in this study. Athletes performed a trial using three different hook punch…

An important but challenging problem-solving technique in introductory mechanics is that of using "tilted axes." For inclined plane and centripetal motion problems, using axes that are aligned relative to the ramp direction or the radial direction (rather than the horizontal and vertical) yields equations that are conceptually more…

Costume jewelry beads are employed to demonstrate how a beam of beads are able to transform into a simple pendulum (single bead) where the pendulum length remains constant throughout. These beads are common and inexpensive for instructors, as well as attractive and exciting for students. Beads are removed from the top, keeping the same pendulum…

Self-propelled motion is a powerful cue that conveys information that an object is animate. In this case, animate refers to an entity's capacity to initiate motion without an applied external force. Sensitivity to this motion cue is present in infants that are a few months old, but whether this sensitivity is experience-dependent or is already…

In this paper we are going to show how learning about some counterintuitive aspects of rolling motion can be facilitated by combining the use of analogies with extreme case reasoning. Specifically, the intuitively comprehensible examples of "rolling" polygonal prisms are used as an analogical anchor that is supposed to help the students…

This paper focuses on a series of activities for students at middle school to college level, designed to instill a sound understanding of fluids and the properties of fluids. The first activities investigate diffusion and molecular size and these are followed by tasks exploring viscosity and the factors effecting viscosity. Following this, there…

When a hard object rolls on a soft surface, or vice versa, rolling friction arises from deformation of the soft object or the soft surface. The friction force can be described in terms of an offset in the normal reaction force or in terms of energy loss arising from the deformation. The origin of the friction force itself is not entirely clear. It…

Purpose: To further understand the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on articulatory movements in speech and to expand our knowledge of therapeutic treatment strategies, this study examined movements of the jaw, tongue blade, and tongue dorsum during sentence production with respect to speech intelligibility and compared the effect of varying…

Prospective motor control, a key element of action planning, is the ability to adjust one's actions with respect to task demands and action goals in an anticipatory manner. The current study investigates whether 14-month-olds can prospectively control their reaching actions based on the difficulty of the subsequent action. We used a reach-to-place…

Free fall is commonly discussed as an example of the equivalence principle, in the context of a homogeneous gravitational field, which is a reasonable approximation for small test masses falling moderate distances. Newton's law of gravity provides a generalisation to larger distances, and also brings in an inhomogeneity in the gravitational field.…