This paper presents exemplification of the ways in which teachers can incorporate the ideology of maker education into STEAM club activities. The intention is to showcase how science teachers can infuse making into their pedagogy and inject more creativity into the learning process, yet still link it to existing science curricula, more…

To improve the teaching and learning materials for a curriculum it is important to incorporate the findings from educational research. In light of this, we present creative exercises and experiments to elicit, confront and resolve misconceptions in geometrical optics. Since ray diagrams can be both the cause and the solution for many…

We present fascinating simple demonstration experiments recorded with high-speed cameras in the field of fluid dynamics. Examples include oscillations of falling droplets, effects happening upon impact of a liquid droplet into a liquid, the disintegration of extremely large droplets in free fall and the consequences of incompressibility. (Contains…

We present a sequence of activities aimed at promoting both learning about magnetic forces and students' reflection about the conceptual bridge between magnetic forces on a moving charge and on a current-carrying wire in a magnetic field. The activity sequence, designed for students in high school or on introductory physics courses, has been…

The extreme pressures that are generated when water freezes were traditionally demonstrated by sealing a small volume in a massive cast iron "bomb" and then surrounding it with a freezing mixture of ice and salt. This vessel would dramatically fail by brittle fracture, but no quantitative measurement of bursting pressure was available. Calculation…

We present a unit comprising theory, simulation and experiment for a body oscillating on a vertical spring, in which the simultaneous use of a force probe and an ultrasonic range finder enables one to explore quantitatively and understand many aspects of simple and damped harmonic motions. (Contains 14 figures.)

A simple experiment is presented to visualize inferior and superior mirages in the laboratory. A quantitative analysis is done using ray tracing with both photographic and computational techniques. The mirage's image, as seen by the eye or the camera lens, can be used to analyse the deflection and inversion of light rays. (Contains 6 footnotes, 1…

It is not common to introduce current astronomy in school lessons. This article presents a set of experiments about gravitational lenses. It is normal to simulate them by means of computers, but it is very simple to simulate similar effects using a drinking glass full of liquid or using only the glass base. These are, of course, cheap and easy…

Using the simple optical system and photodiode described in this article it is possible to give clear, quantitative demonstrations of all the Fraunhofer diffraction phenomena at single and multiple apertures. These measurements can be related to the theoretical predictions given in standard textbooks. Circuit diagram and optical layout are…