When a federal court in 2005 rejected an attempt by the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to explain the development of life on Earth, it sparked a renaissance in involvement among scientists in K-12 science instruction. Now, some of those teaching programs, studies, and research…

This work is an attempt to see how physics undergraduates view the basic ideas of general relativity when they are exposed to the topic in a standard introductory course. Since the subject is conceptually and technically difficult, we adopted a "case studies" approach, focusing in depth on about six students who had just finished a one semester…

Metal oxalate synthesis and pyrolysis provides an opportunity for students to (i) learn stoichiometry, (ii) experience the consequences of proper stoichiometric calculations and experimental techniques, and (iii) be introduced to the relevance of chemistry by highlighting oxalates in context, for example, usages and health effects. At our…

In this laboratory experiment, students obtain information about the structure of a host-guest complex from the interpretation of circular dichroism measurements. The value and sign of the induced circular dichroism (ICD) on an achiral chromophore guest when it complexes with a cyclodextrin can be related to the guest penetration and its…

This case study places the high school student as a researcher for Carbonation Creators (fictional entity), a company responsible for making the Fizzy Forcer (a device to improve carbonation in previously opened bottles of soft drinks). The company faces a class-action lawsuit claiming that the Fizzy Forcer does not retain carbonation levels in…

The authors of this paper portray the perspective of Professor Leon Cooper, a theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate, active researcher, and physics textbook author, on teaching science and on the nature of science (NOS). The views presented emerged from an interview prepared by the authors and responded to in writing by Professor Cooper. Based on…

It was refreshing to read Hisham Ghassib's (2010) article outlining his model of scientific knowledge production. Too few scholarly writings in creative studies and gifted education deal with issues at the large-scale, panoramic level of analysis. Ghassib (2010) would not disappoint Albert Einstein who lamented that "I have little patience with…

The propagation in time of a wavepacket is a conceptually rich problem suitable to be studied in any introductory quantum mechanics course. This subject is covered analytically in most of the standard textbooks. Computer simulations have become a widespread pedagogical tool, easily implemented in computer labs and in classroom demonstrations.…

Many textbooks dealing with general relativity do not demonstrate the derivation of forces in enough detail. The analyses presented herein demonstrate straightforward methods for computing forces by way of general relativity. Covariant divergence of the stress-energy-momentum tensor is used to derive a general expression of the force experienced…

Students--and just about everyone else--tend to have a wide range of misconceptions about microbes. This article is aimed at changing how students view microbes by engaging them in two hands-on activities that are fun and creative and align with both the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996) and the Essential Principles of Ocean Literacy…

Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution and, as a result, changed the course of human history. However, the geologic history of coal is much, much longer than that which is recorded by humans. In your classroom, the coal cycle can be used to trace the formation of this important economic resource from its plant origins, through its lithification, or…

According to the National Science Education Standards, students should be able to describe an object by its position, direction of motion, and speed (NRC 1996). During a unit on motion, the author decided to use Hot Wheels cars as the object students would describe. The first two activities are used to introduce students to the equipment and the…

Thermoacoustic instability plays an important role in various technical applications, for instance in jet or rocket motors, thermoacoustic engines, pulse combustors and industrial burners. The main objective of this paper is to present the theory of thermoacoustic oscillations, and for this purpose a Rijke-type thermal device was built. The Rijke…

A pendulum with periodically varying length is an interesting physical system. It has been studied by some researchers using traditional perturbation methods (for example, the averaging method). But due to the limitation of the conventional perturbation methods, the solutions are not valid for long-term prediction of the pendulum. In this paper,…

Historically, science was introduced into the school curriculum to enable students, who were entering university to study science related subjects, to gain some background knowledge before beginning studies at the university level (Fensham, 2008, p 14). Unfortunately this view is still very prevalent among policy-makers and teachers today. And…