This article examines several readily available "magic tricks" which base their "trickery" on physics principles, and questions the use of the word "magic" in the 21st century, both in popular children's science and in everyday language. (Contains 18 figures.)

Two results support the idea that the scalar and vector potentials in the Lorenz gauge can be considered to be physical quantities: (i) they separately satisfy the properties of causality and propagation at the speed of light and do not imply spurious terms and (ii) they can naturally be written in a manifestly covariant form. In this paper we…

In and with this text, I introduce the Forum that centers around a series of essays written by a high school student and an interview with his teacher all collected as part of a larger study about students' discourses with respect to (nature of) science, learning, and knowing. I provide a brief review of the original findings, which had been…

Illusionists use mirrors to create appearances that conflict with our notions of reality. This paper discusses an activity involving the Pulfrich effect that, in the end, makes use of a mirror to distinguish between appearance and reality.

The idea of using a dice game to simulate radioactive decay is not new. However, modern pedagogy encourages, if not requires, us to provide multiple representations and visualizations for our students. The advantage of interactive engagement methods also has been made clear. Here we describe a highly visual and interactive use of dice to develop…

There have been two articles in this journal that described a pair of collision carts used to demonstrate vividly the difference between elastic and inelastic collisions. One cart had a series of washers that were mounted rigidly on a rigid wooden framework, the other had washers mounted on rubber bands stretched across a framework. The rigidly…

Comparing the predicted and actual rolls of combinations of both two and three dice can help to introduce many of the basic concepts of statistical thermodynamics, including multiplicity, probability, microstates, and macrostates, and demonstrate that entropy is indeed a measure of randomness, that disordered states (those of higher entropy) are…

The measurement of the mass, or the density, of air can easily be done with very simple materials and offers many interesting phenomena for discussion--buoyancy and its effects being the most obvious but not the only one. Many interesting considerations can be done regarding the behavior of gases, the effect of the external conditions in the…

Active learning is individual and group participation in effective activities such as in-class observing, writing, experimenting, discussion, solving problems, and talking about to-be-learned topics. Some instructors believe that active learning is impossible, or at least extremely difficult to achieve in large lecture sessions. Nevertheless, the…

Of the eight practices of science identified in "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012), helping students develop and use models has been identified by many as an anchor (Schwarz and Passmore 2012; Windschitl 2012). In instruction, disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and scientific practices can be meaningfully…

Physics teachers use experimental devices to show students how scientific concepts, principles, and laws are applied to understand the real world. This paper studies question generation of secondary and under-graduate university students when they are confronted with experimental devices in different but usual teaching situations: reading about…

Israel suffers from a growing problem of socio-economic gaps between those who live in the center of the country and residents of outlying areas. As a result, there is a low level of accessibility to higher education among the peripheral population. The goal of the Sidney Warren Science Education Center for Youth at Tel-Hai College is to…

Experiments, as we all know, are especially important in science education. However, their impact on improving thinking could be even greater when applied together with the methods of inquiry-based learning (IBL). In this paper we present our observations of a high-school laboratory class where students used computers to carry out and analyse real…

This paper investigates the characteristics of 15-year-old girls who express an intention to study physics post-16. This paper unpacks issues around within-girl group differences and similarities between boys and girls in survey responses about physics. The analysis is based on the year 10 (age 15 years) responses of 5,034 students from 137 UK…

Background: Research is needed to explore conceptual change in relation to achievement goal orientations and depth of processing. Aims: To address this need, we examined relations between achievement goals, use of deep versus shallow processing strategies, and conceptual change learning using a think-aloud protocol. Sample and Method:…