The 1884 book "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions," written by Edwin Abbott, has captured the interest of numerous generations, and has also been used in schools to help students learn and think about the concept of dimension in a creative, fun way. In 2007, a film was released called "Flatland: The Movie," and over one…

A fluorescence demonstration is described that incorporates several fundamental aspects of an introductory biochemistry course. A variation of a known leakage assay is utilized to prepare vesicles containing a quenched fluorophore. The vesicles are exposed to several osmotic environments ranging from isotonic to hypotonic. The degree of vesicle…

Color addition and subtraction apps in HTML5 have been developed for students as an online hands-on experience so that they can more easily master principles introduced through traditional classroom demonstrations. The evolution of the additive RGB color model is traced through the early IBM color adapters so that students can proceed step by step…

Sustainability in operations, production, and consumption continues to gain relevance for engineers. This trend will accelerate as demand for goods and services grows, straining resources and requiring ingenuity to replace boundless supply in meeting the needs of a more crowded, more prosperous world. Industrial engineers are uniquely positioned…

Diffusion is critical to physiological processes ranging from gas exchange across alveoli to transport within individual cells. In the classroom, however, it can be challenging to convey the concept of diffusion on the microscopic scale. In this article, we present a series of three exercises that use food and cooking to illustrate diffusion…

Here we describe an experiment for the undergraduate physical chemistry laboratory in which students synthesize the intermetallic compounds AlNi and AlNi3 and study them by X-ray diffractometry. The compounds are synthesized in a simple one-step reaction occurring in the solid state. Powder X-ray diffractograms are recorded for the two compounds…

An interdisciplinary laboratory experiment involving second-year undergraduate organic chemistry and introductory inorganic chemistry undergraduate students is described. Organic chemistry students prepare a series of amine-bis(phenols) via a Mannich reaction, and characterize their products using melting point; FTIR; and [superscript 1]H,…

G, G°, [delta][subscript r]G, [delta][subscript r]G°, [delta]G, and [delta]G° are essential quantities to master the chemical equilibrium. Although the number of publications devoted to explaining these items is extremely high, it seems that they do not produce the desired effect because some articles and textbooks are still being written with…

Although the simulation of an oxidation/reduction titration curve is an important exercise in an undergraduate course in quantitative analysis, that exercise is frequently simplified to accommodate computational limitations. With the use of readily available computer algebra systems, however, such curves for complicated systems can be generated…

In the past three decades, previous researches showed that students had various misconceptions of Newton's Third Law. The present study focused on students' difficulties in identifying the third-law force pair in gravity interaction situations. An instrument involving contexts with gravity and non-gravity associated interactions was designed and…

Wind musical instruments are affected in their intonation by temperature. We show how to account for these effects in a simple experiment, and provide results in languages accessible to both physics and music professionals.

A.V. Usova (1921-2014) has always been one of the leading figures in Russian physics education. Her theory of physics concept formation was formulated during the 1970s and the 1980s and directly influenced the process of physics education in the 20th and the 21st century. Over the years there have been a lot of theories of concept formation. Her…

Children construct representations of concepts and physical phenomena and these representations are critical to education. The natural phenomenon of clouds is perceivable and also observable by young children in everyday life. Moreover, it is a subject approached by the early childhood science education curriculums. However, in several studies it…

Scientific explanations require levels of both precision and generality that are not characteristic of everyday thinking. For example, an equation such as F = ma can be used to make specific predictions across a wide range of situations. How can science instruction help students to appreciate the utility and importance of precise general…

Access to curriculum learning materials is a central need for students who are blind. This research examined the use of Listening-to-Complexity (L2C) based on NetLogo, an agent-based modeling language enabling exploration and construction of models of complex systems. L2C, designed for users who are blind, provides several auditory streams…