At the introductory level, projectile motion is usually considered under the assumption of the absence of air resistance. Even the simplest case of linear drag might be beyond the students, as it requires some familiarity with differential equations. This leaves many students wondering about the effect of air resistance on the motion and the way…

Despite holding wide-ranging experiences with constant velocity and non-zero acceleration, students wrestling with physical science concepts struggle to demarcate the two distinct characteristics of motion. In fact, this prior experience and loose familiarity with associated terminology often act as an obstacle toward a deep and robust…

Objects are everywhere. People deal with them from the beginning of their lives. From babyhood, they start to recognise them and, progressively, learn to define their attributes and designate the actions related to them. Although the basis of object-oriented programming is translating real-world objects into the object-oriented code, learning…

This column shares reflections or thoughtful opinions on issues of broad interest to the community. This month's issue discusses why college teachers should become familiar with the NGSS.

There is no such thing as being "English-y" or "maths-y." One person may find English comes more naturally, but being naturally gifted at one subject does not make a person bad at the others. Just because we may find it more challenging to access certain content, this does not mean there is a barrier. William James Turner…

For many students, the experience with science tends to be alienating and uprooting. In this study, I take up Simone Weil's concepts of "enracinement" (rooting) and "déracinement" (uprooting) to theorize the root of this alienation, the confrontation between children's familiarity with the world and unfamiliar/strange…

These laboratory experiments are designed to familiarize students with concepts of spectroscopy by using sound waves. Topics covered in these experiments include the structure of nitinol alloys and polymer chain stiffness as a function of structure and temperature. Generally, substances that are stiffer or have higher symmetry at the molecular…

Learning the symbolic language of chemistry is a difficult task that can be frustrating for students. This article introduces a game, ChemOkey, that can help students learn the names and symbols of common ions and their compounds in a fun environment. ChemOkey, a game similar to Rummikub, is played with a set of 106 plastic or wooden tiles. The…

Students learn new abstract concepts best when these concepts are connected through a well-designed analogy, to familiar ideas. Since the concept of the relativistic spacetime distance is highly abstract, it would be desirable to connect it to the familiar Euclidean distance, but present the latter in such a way that it makes a transparent contact…

Since electrical field concepts are usually unfamiliar, abstract, and difficult to visualize, conceptual analogies from familiar gravitational phenomena are valuable for teaching. Such analogies emphasize the underlying continuity of field concepts in physics and support the spiral development of student understanding. We find the following four…

I describe how data pooling and data visualization can be employed in the first-semester general chemistry laboratory to introduce core statistical concepts such as central tendency and dispersion of a data set. The pooled data are plotted as a 1-D scatterplot, a purpose-designed number line through which statistical features of the data are…

Some teachers are uncomfortable with teaching ethics, a subject that science teachers often have very little experience with. Ethics as a discipline is full of unfamiliar terms and its own jargon. Other teachers fear classroom discussions getting out of control, degenerating into a battle of opinions, or having parents and administrators confuse…

Giant exploding volcanoes...asteroids crashing into Earth...continents floating across the oceans...massive pools of lava...violent earthquakes splitting continents--middle school students hold a variety of ideas about Earth, how it has changed over time, and what has caused these changes. Listening to students talk about how the world works is…

Systems biology, metabolomics, metabolic engineering, and other recent developments in biochemistry suggest that future biochemists will require a detailed familiarity with the compounds and pathways of intermediary metabolism and their biochemical control. The challenge to the biochemistry instructor is the presentation of metabolic pathways in a…