A simple and cheap laboratory class is proposed to illustrate the lethal effect of UV radiation on bacteria and the operation of different DNA repair mechanisms. The class is divided into two sessions, an initial 3-hour experimental session and a second 2-hour analytical session. The experimental session involves two separate experiments: one…

During the last few years teaching physics, I have noticed that my students are becoming more and more interested in the topic of radiation. Mobile phones, modern game consoles, and WiFi--all of these devices involving some kind of radiation are part of our students' everyday lives. Students are also frequently confronted in the media with…

Eight inquiry-based activities, described here in sufficient detail for faculty to adopt in their own courses, were designed to teach students fundamental concepts in heat transfer. The concept areas chosen were (1) factors affecting the rate vs. amount of heat transfer, (2) temperature vs. perceptions of hot and cold, (3) temperature vs. energy…

The purpose of this study is to create a short comic story about historical emergence of Planck's explanation of blackbody radiation and to investigate what students learn from it and what they think about the usage of comics in modern physics course. The participants are a small group of undergraduate students studying at department of science…

This article describes a lesson on the greenhouse effect in which students explore blackbody radiation and Wien's law. The lesson, which has been tested in a variety of high school physics classrooms, uses probeware and online simulations and combines two well-established instructional strategies: the 5E Learning Cycle (Bybee et al. 2006) and the…

To better understand environmental electromagnetic wave exposure during the use of digital textbooks by elementary school students, we measured numeric values of the electromagnetic fields produced by tablet personal computers (TPCs). Specifically, we examined the distribution of the electromagnetic waves for various students' seating positions in…

What do basketball teams have in common with radioactive nuclei? It turns out, there is more here than first meets the eye. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournaments feeds fans' craving when NBA competitions are not in swing, and the college tournament time has been referred to as "March Madness" or…

Colorado State University Extension in Chaffee and Park Counties conducted numerous outreach educational activities between 2007 and 2010. A follow-up evaluation was conducted to determine whether one outreach activity was more effective at encouraging individuals to test their homes for radon or to mitigate their homes. Participants in the…

We repeated the historical infra-red radiation experiments performed by Melloni, to investigate why, at the end of his life, he came to the conclusion that radiation from light and heat rely on the same basic principle, what has been translated as the so called unitary formalism. In doing so, we profited from a Master thesis on heat radiation and…

Radiation, radiation detection and radiation protection are topics in physics and its applications which generate a wide interest in the public. This interest is either generated through medical procedures, applications of nuclear energy or nuclear accidents. The technical nature of these topics usually means that they are not well covered in the…

Sunscreens have different levels of protection, measured most commonly with the sun protection factor (SPF). Students initially believed higher SPF factors mean greater sun protection and learned through this activity that higher SPF does not mean greater protection. Students analyzed the amount of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) protection and…

The Innovative Technology in Science Inquiry (ITSI) project is a learning portal with hundreds of free, customizable science, math, and engineering activities funded by the National Science Foundation at the Concord Consortium, a nonprofit research and development organization dedicated to transforming education through technology. The project…

In this experiment, students build a spectrometer to explore infrared radiation and greenhouse gases in an inquiry-based investigation to introduce climate science in a general chemistry lab course. The lab is based on the exploration of the thermal effects of molecular absorption of infrared radiation by greenhouse and non-greenhouse gases. A…

A short series of practical classroom mathematics activities employing the use of a large and publicly accessible scientific data set are presented for use by students in years 9 and 10. The activities introduce and build understanding of integral calculus and trigonometric functions through the presentation of practical problem solving that…

Maxwell's discovery of the relation between electricity, magnetism, and light was one of the most important ones in physics. With his added displacement current term, Maxwell showed that the equations of electricity and magnetism produced a radiation solution, electromagnetic (EM) radiation, that traveled with a speed of c=1/v(e0µ0). The…