Supersonic free-fall jumps are excellent examples of kinematics in the context of drag. They have attracted a lot of media, public, and scientific interest. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a height of approximately 38.969 km. During his flight he reached a top speed of 373 m/s, becoming the first human to travel faster than the speed of…

The word "wave" is part of the daily language of every student. However, the physical understanding of the concept demands a high level of abstract thought. In physics, waves are oscillating variations of a physical quantity that involve the transfer of energy from one point to another, without displacement of matter. A wave can be…

The nature of the drag force on an object moving through a fluid is well documented and many experiments have been described to allow students to measure the force. For low speed flows the drag force is proportional to the velocity of the object, while at high flow speeds the drag force is proportional to the velocity squared. The basic physics…

This study aims to demonstrate how the average speed of a light-emitting toy car may be determined using a smartphone's light sensor. The freely available Android smartphone application, "AndroSensor," was used for the experiment. The classroom experiment combines complementary physics knowledge of optics and kinematics to find the…

A science video blog, which has gone viral, shows a wooden block shot by a vertically aimed rifle. The video shows that the block hit dead center goes exactly as high as the one shot off-center. (Fig. 1). The puzzle is that the block shot off-center carries rotational kinetic energy in addition to the gravitational potential energy. This leads a…

The resources framework provides a useful and generative model of student thinking and learning. In particular, it suggests various strategies for instruction such as priming resources and refining intuition that allow students to build on knowledge they already have. In this paper, we describe the affordances of the resources framework in guiding…

Research has demonstrated that many students and some teachers do not consistently apply the conservation of energy principle when analyzing mechanical scenarios. In observing elementary and secondary teachers engaged in learning activities that require tracking and conserving energy, we find that challenges to energy conservation often arise in…

Video analysis of motion has been in use now for some time. However, some teachers may not have video equipment or may be looking for innovative ways to engage students with interesting applications at no cost. The recent advent of YouTube offers opportunities for students to measure kinematic properties of real-life events using their computers.…

Physics teachers often like to discuss physics concepts with their students on the basis of simple demonstration experiments. In this article, we discuss an experiment for which one only needs a few coins of the same denomination and a wooden stick: the coins are laid alongside the stick on a horizontal surface, the stick is rotated about one of…