A physical model has been designed to help students visualize concepts involved when solving infrared spectra. The physical model uses balls and springs to incorporate the harmonic oscillator model and Hooke's law to study dynamic vibrations within diatomic molecules. Various concepts are addressed with the model to abstract principles about how…

The labs presented here build on a simple speed of sound activity and models medical ultrasound imaging by demonstrating how multiple reflections propagate in a closed system. A short sound pulse is emitted into a pipe that is closed at one end and contains one or more partially reflecting surfaces within the pipe. The variety of reflections and…

Molecular symmetry and orbitals are two important chemical concepts which can be difficult for students to visualize in three dimensions; as such, instructors have traditionally adopted a variety of approaches to teach them including the use of physical models and digital renderings/resources. This paper describes a new mobile device application…

Spatial ability was defined by Lohman (1996) as the ability to create, maintain, retrieve, and change visual pictures. Linn and Peterson (1985) distinguished among spatial perception, mental rotation, and spatial visualization. Spatial perception is the determination of spatial connections with respect to the orientation of the learners' body;…

The ability to visualize chemical processes can be an asset in a teaching laboratory. Despite the advances in laboratory technology, apparatuses used in the teaching of simple thermodynamics concepts, such as exothermic/endothermic reactions, historically remain unchanged and can benefit from a fresh perspective. The recent incorporation of…

The author offers practical strategies to introduce and maintain a mindfulness practice with middle-grade students and discusses ethical implications of employing mindfulness in the classroom.

This article uses dynamic software in Excel to demonstrate several ways in which graphical and numerical approaches can be introduced both to enhance student understanding of l'Hopital's Rule and to explain why the Rule actually works to give the "right" answers. One of the approaches used is to visualize what is happening by examining…

Despite the interesting applications that the PDF-3D offers in teaching, especially for subjects related to spatial comprehension difficulties, such a didactic tool is not well known in the education sector. Thus, a proposal of using PDF-3D in engineering studies is presented in this paper, specifically, in the field of teaching ternary phase…

In this paper we present two simulations designed with GeoGebra that illustrate dynamically a key concept in Vector Calculus: line integrals of vector fields, along with other associated mathematical properties and applications. Students are not required to know the GeoGebra environment: a user-friendly interface with buttons, functionalities and…

The goal of this paper is to promote the use of R and Python as high-level, free, open-source programming environments that can be used as a computational and visualization tool for teaching differential equations. Both R and Python also allow for creating reproducible dynamic documents using Markdown, which combines live code, plain text, and…

Structured Query Language (SQL) is still the de facto database query language widely used in industry and taught in almost all university level database courses. The role of SQL is further strengthened by the emergence of NewSQL systems which use SQL as their query language as well as some NoSQL systems, e.g., Cassandra and DynamoDB, which base…

Spatial visualisation is an essential component of geometric thinking and measurement sense. It is a particular type of spatial skill that involves manipulation of spatial images and may not be naturally occurring for students. However, research shows that it is malleable and can be developed through instruction. This article presents an…

This paper develops the ideas of "The Pedagogical Power of Context: Iterative Calculus Methods and the Epidemiology of Eyam" (French "et al." 2018 "J. Phys. Educ."), where we considered the application of the Euler method to solve epidemiological problems. Our purpose was to convey some examples of school level work…

Simulation is an effective tool for analyzing probability models as well as for facilitating understanding of concepts in probability and statistics. Unfortunately, implementing a simulation from scratch often requires users to think about programming issues that are not relevant to the simulation itself. We have developed a Python package called…

The authors explore how 3D visualizations of historical sites can be used as pedagogical tools to support historical empathy. They provide three visualizations created by a team at Virginia Tech as examples. They discuss virtual environments and how the digital restoration process is applied. They also define historical empathy, explain why it is…