We present a first-principles determination of the photoelectron spectra of water and hypochlorous acid as a laboratory exercise accessible to students in an undergraduate physical chemistry course. This paper demonstrates the robustness and user-friendliness of software developed for the Franck-Condon factor calculation. While the calculator is…

When students understand content deeply, they recognize main concepts and understand the relationships among ideas. But the typical processes students use to study are generally not designed to generate conceptual understandings. Instead, they tend to become passive learners. In this article, the authors present three commonly used classroom…

While most prepared exercises for ethics in science programs--including an excellent AAAS video series--present a complete account of the relevant facts, a role-playing exercise is described here in which the participants are provided with differing reports of events. The exercise is based on a true case involving a student who was convicted of…

An inexpensive and easily implemented device to measure wind velocity is proposed. This prototype has the advantage of being able to measure both the speed and the direction of the wind in two dimensions. The device utilizes a computational interface commonly referred to as a "mouse." The mouse proposed for this prototype contains an…

Hands-on biological exploration has been shown to have a great impact on learning. When students "do" something, they remember more details than when they sit through a lecture describing the same activity. In this article, the authors present an exercise that has the potential to get all levels of students into the lab for practical experience…

Protein folding is an exploding area of research in biophysics and physical chemistry. Here, we describe the integration of several techniques, including absorption spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, and Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET) measurements, to probe important topics in protein folding. Cytochrome c is used as a model…

Switzerland is the land of Big Ideas, where even the streets have Nobel prizes. At the European particle physics lab known as CERN, the roads through campus bear the names of Einstein, Curie, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Working amid those tributes to giants of the past century, physicists from around the world are trying to make history of their own and…

Discrepancies abound in use of the word "inquiry." In this paper, the authors propose a quantitative rubric designed to characterize the level of inquiry in laboratory activities and laboratory curricula. They do not wish to answer the question, "What is inquiry?" but rather, provide a tool for identifying its varying degrees of student…

For democracy to thrive, students increasingly need to participate in democratic education. During the first half of the twentieth century, two education reformers individually developed, refined, and implemented two different forms of democratic education. In this article, the author describes the purpose of public schooling and how John Dewey…

In this study, the author examined how attendance in the lab is associated with students' lab grades and overall course grades in an introductory biology course. Results from this study indicate that academic motivation, as expressed by high rates of class attendance, is critical to students' success in introductory science courses. The highest…

A simple model of the random Brownian walk of a spherical mesoscopic particle in viscous liquids is proposed. The model can be solved analytically and simulated numerically. The analytic solution gives the known Einstein-Smoluchowski diffusion law r[superscript 2] = 2Dt, where the diffusion constant D is expressed by the mass and geometry of a…

This project is conducted by students during the second semester of their second year in our educational institution. This project constitutes an initiation into research and allows a broadening of knowledge, a development in autonomy, organization, team work, and initiative. It helps prepare the student-engineer for an internship in industry. The…

X-ray fluorescence is a non-destructive technique that allows elemental composition analysis. In this paper we describe a prescription to obtain the elemental composition of homogeneous coins, like 50 cent Euro coins, and how to get the quantitative proportions of each element with the help of Monte Carlo simulation. Undergraduate students can…

It is shown how the same physically appealing method can be applied to find analytic solutions for two difficult and apparently unrelated problems in optics and electrostatics. They are: (i) the diffraction of a plane wave at a perfectly conducting thin half-plane and (ii) the electrostatic field associated with a parallel array of stripes held at…

One of the most intimidating tasks faced by new or practicing technology education teachers is the challenge of creating new facilities or renovating current facilities for a new purpose. While the fourth program standard in "Advancing Excellence in Technological Literacy: Student Assessment, Professional Development, and Program Standards (AETL)"…