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We have developed a circuit board using materials that are inexpensive and familiar to elementary school students. Most of the responses from students who made this board were relatively positive and we observed them enjoy making the boards at a Science Festival in Japan and in elementary school. As an application, we also developed a tiny torch using similar materials and a similar method. The method of making the board and the torch are explained in detail, and the characteristics of the board are presented along with students' impressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a synthesis of research evidence around teaching light to primary and secondary school pupils as part of the Institute of Physics Promoting and Interpreting Physics Education Research (PIPER) project. Conceptual change literature describes many of the difficulties young people can have understanding the phenomenon of light, and this knowledge can be useful in the classroom. Pupil–teacher dialogue is used to illustrate some of the pedagogical challenges teachers face in this topic. This paper also highlights the range of influences on pupils from everyday life and from the classroom, with a view to promoting teacher awareness of conceptual change research evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campus security has aroused many concerns from the whole society. Stampede is one of the most frequent and influential accidents in campus. Studies on pedestrian dynamics especially focusing on students are essential for campus security, which are helpful to improve facility design and emergency evacuation strategy. In this paper, primary and middle school students were recruited to participate in the single-file experiments. The microscopic movement characteristics, including walking speed, headway, gait characteristics (step length, step frequency and swaying amplitude) and their relations were investigated. Age and gender differences in the headway-speed diagram and space requirements were analyzed by statistical tests. The results indicated that the impacts of age and gender were significant. There were three stages for the influence of gender on the headway-speed diagram for both age groups. The impacts on students' space requirements were consistent for different age and gender groups. But the impacts of age and gender on free-flow speed were affected by each other. Due to the connection of walking speed and gait characteristics, the comparisons of gait characteristics between different ages and genders were performed to understand the corresponding differences in speed more deeply. The results showed that differences in step length and swaying amplitude between males and females were significant for both age groups. The effect of gender on step frequency was significant for primary students. But for middle school students, whether gender had significant impact on step frequency was not clear here because of the large P-value. Besides, the influence of age on gait characteristics changed with gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the formation of a circumzenithal arc for the purpose of teaching light and optics. A circumzenithal arc, an optic formation rarely witnessed by people, is formed in this study using a water-filled cylindrical glass illuminated by sunlight. Sunlight refracted at the top and side surfaces of the glass of water is dispersed into its constituent colours. First, multi-colour arcs are observed on paper at the bottom of the glass. Then, a single arc for each colour is observed on the floor when the rays are allowed to propagate to the furthest points from the glass. The change in observations is explained by formulating an equation for the geometry of the situation. The formula relates each point on the first refracting surface for an incoming light ray to a point further from the second refracting surface. Then, a parallel graph is drawn to visualize the superposition of colours to the formation of a single arc. The geometrical optics studies in this paper exemplify the concept of Snell’s law, total internal reflection and dispersion. The duration of the observation on a circumzenithal arc is limited by the altitude of the Sun in the sky. This study depends on the use of astronomy software to track solar altitude. Pedagogical aspects of the study are discussed for inquiry-based teaching and learning of light and optics concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, primary school students’ and pre-service teachers’ ideas of seasonal change are investigated. The research was carried out in nine primary schools in Athens and in the Primary Education Department of the University of Athens. Written reports were used for gathering data while students also had the opportunity to support their answers with drawings. The results showed the following. (1) Pre-service teachers address notions which involve the movement of the Sun and/or the Earth, while primary school students address human centred, tautological and phenomenological notions as well. (2) Both primary school students and pre-service teachers mainly adopt two schemes of explanation: alterations in the distance between the Sun and the Earth and alterations in the Earth–Sun relative orientation/illumination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many students find it difficult to apply certain physics concepts to their daily lives. This is especially true when they perceive a principle taught in physics class as being in conflict with their experience. An important instance of this occurs when students are instructed to ignore the effect of air resistance when solving kinematics problems. To a student, this assumption disconnects from their everyday experience. Mathematically, ignoring the effect of air resistance is crucial, however, since it renders such problems tractable. However, this step is rarely, if ever, provided with justification in undergraduate texts, leading students to believe that what they are taught does not apply to their everyday experience. Taking the additional step of clarifying when it is reasonable to ignore air resistance makes students’ reconciliation of their everyday experiences with the physics principle of free fall more likely. In this paper we develop a graphical tool intended to make this step as simple and effective as possible. We do this by summarising the results of a set of numerical simulations of various balls falling under the effects of both gravity and air resistance by means of a carefully chosen graph: a plot of an object’s cross-sectional surface are versus its mass. We further use our numerical results to evaluate how these two variables relate to the effects of air resistance for balls dropped from varying heights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper accounts for progress in physics teaching in the sense that a problem, which has been closed to students for being too difficult, is gained for the high school curriculum. This problem is the compound Atwood machine with three bodies. Its introduction into high school classes is based on a recent study on the weighing of an Atwood machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bright Lights: Big Experiments! public engagement project enabled high school students Scottish S2 to prepare a short, 5 min video using their own words and in their own style to present a scientific experiment on the theme of light to their contemporaries via YouTube. This paper describes the various experiments that we chose to deliver and our experiences in delivering them to our partner schools. The results of pre- and post-activity surveys of both the pupils and teachers are presented in an effort to understand the impact of the project on the students, staff and their schools. The quality of the final video product is shown to be a key factor, increasing the pupils’ likelihood of pursuing science courses and participating in further science engagement activities. Analysis of the evaluation methods used indicate the need for more sensitive tools to provide further insight into the impact of this type of engagement activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe how we motivate senior school pupils using environmental experiments with a luxmeter. We also show how we 'discover' the photometrical law in class. This type of teaching can help to show the connection between physics and daily life, and students can enjoy the process of investigating science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While writing the scheme of work for a physics course for 14–16 year-olds I decided to create units based on topics, and to specifically aim some of the topics at groups of pupils who might normally miss the relevance of physics. One of these topics was called 'Health and Beauty' and it was written with girls in mind. This paper describes some of the activities that were included in that topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1820 the Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism by his famous wire-compass experiment. Ørsted was one of the foremost scientists of the nineteenth century, and he was also one of the leading figures in Denmark in the 19th century with a vital influence in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, education, politics and religion. In this paper the work and life of Ørsted is placed in a school context with the rationale to accentuate that learning of physics needs to be accompanied by learning about physics, its history, its interrelations with culture, worldviews, and commerce, its philosophical assumptions, its epistemology and methodology. Narratives are introduced as a pedagogical support to this approach and two concrete examples of teaching sequences centred on the work and life of Ørsted is described in grade 7 and grade 9 classes, respectively. A prominent feature of the sequences was that all the activities of the pupils as an outcome should have a product. Products like a movie, a loudspeaker, a fairy tale or a newspaper played an important role by encouraging the pupils to produce both personally meaningful works as well as products that are useful for their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is aimed at first introducing a well-known discrepant event; inseparable phone books and second, turning it into an experiment for high school or middle school students. This discrepant event could be used especially to indicate how friction force can be effective in producing an unexpected result. Demonstration, discussion, explanation and experiment steps are presented on how to turn a simple discrepant event into an instructional activity. Results showed the relationships between number of pages and force, as well as between amounts of interleave and force. In addition to these, the mathematical equation for the total force between all interleaved pages is derived. As a conclusion, this study demonstrated that not only can phone books be used, but also ordinary books, to investigate this discrepant event. This experiment can be conducted as an example to show the agreement between theoretical and experimental results along with the confounding variables. This discrepant event can be used to create a cognitive conflict in students’ minds about the concepts of ‘force and motion’ and ‘friction force’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a sequence of nine, easy to manufacture optical black-box experiments with increasing levels of difficulty, and supportive frameworks for physics classes are introduced. They have been evaluated in a lower-secondary school at the end of optics lessons. A black-box is a kind of experimental task where the inner structure is not visible to the experimenter. Using mirrors, beam-splitters, and blockers in a black-box to manipulate the light beam’s direction through this specific experiment, students are instructed to vary input and observe the output of light to get an idea of the possible inner structure. The presented sequence of black-box experiments requires a basic knowledge of the linear propagation of light and is suitable for beginner physics. Furthermore a framework for concrete implementation to physics classes is given, which covers suitable structure of class, examples for helpful worksheets, and authentic students’ solutions. The difficulty of the specific black-box experiments is given by the students’ success within observing input–output correlation and conclusion of an inner structure. The experiments’ implementation to physics classes may cover elaboration, practice, and aspects of the nature of science even in a beginner’s class. Evaluation has been conducted with students of young age (11–12 years old), however they are suitable for older students also. Although dealing with a time extensive sequence of experiments, students showed a high level of motivation throughout. Overall, implementing this sequence of black-box experiments is seen as valuable and helpful for physics classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The addition of soap to vortexing water produces bubble structures around the vortices’ ‘throats’ that resemble galaxies of stars. Such soap-bubble models can be used to suggest the prediction that, at the heart of spiral galaxies may lie supermassive black holes. Combined with earlier work on illuminating black holes, these simple models could be useful classroom demonstrations of the extreme consequences of space-time distortion predicted by general relativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The harmonics for an open cone with slant length are the same as the harmonics for an open pipe with length . When the cone is transformed through phases of closed–open conical frusta into a cylinder of length closed at one end, the fundamental halves and only odd harmonics remain. A simple approach using boundary conditions is presented in order to understand this remarkable fact. A new free interactive HMTL5 application is provided which enables the user to hear the resonances of a complete cone transform into the pitches of a conical frustum closed at the small end, and eventually into the odd harmonics of a closed cylindrical pipe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a range of practical activities that allows students to investigate the properties and applications of magnets. The activities can be used in isolation or used together to build a rounded understanding of the subject area. The activities include simple demonstrations using common or inexpensive equipment, hands-on experiments for small groups, and interactive problem solving suitable for whole classes. These can be tailored for students in either primary or secondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a brief history of the Levitron, the first horizontal axis Levitron is reported. Because it is easy to operate, it lends itself to educational physics experiments and analogies. Precession and nutation are visualized by reflecting the beam from a laser pointer off the ‘spignet’. Precession is fundamental to nuclear magnetic resonance, magnetic resonance imaging, particle traps and the movement of bodies in space. Longitudinal and lateral bounce behaviour is explained via ‘the principle of gentle superposition’ of two traps: the micro-precessional and the macro-trap. Theory is initiated. Scaling experiments are mentioned. Industrial applications might follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a school-university collaboration to involve students in the deployment, testing, and operation of a very low frequency (VLF) radio receiver as part of an international network of such experiments. A background to the collaboration is presented, along with a summary of planning and development, and the ultimate deployment of the hardware. The integration and involvement of students in data analysis and testing is discussed and we summarize how students further develop their application of the scientific method via their role as custodians of the experiment. Such enrichment activities allow the students access to carry out non-curricular activities they would not normally have access to. We consider that the project as a whole may be used as a template for other school-university experimental collaborations [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For pupils of both sexes and all ages from about six upwards, the subject of Astronomy holds many fascinations - the rapid changes in knowledge, the large resource of available IT packages and above all the beautiful pictures from Hubble and the large Earth-based telescopes. This article, however, stresses the excitement and importance of naked-eye (unaided) first-hand observation, where light pollution allows, and suggests some techniques that may be used to enthuse and introduce youngsters to the glory of the night sky without recourse to computer screens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining super-resolution structured illumination microscopy (SIM) and lattice lightsheet microscopes (LLSMs) has always been an ideal approach for high spatiotemporal resolution in 3D applications. We propose a simpler method to perform 2D-SIM with three phases, which is 5/3 faster and less sensitive to optical alignment compared to 3D-SIM in LLSM. In this research, we modify the original square lattice lightsheet to become an ideal pattern for the 2D-SIM by filtering the illumination pattern on the back pupil of the excitation objective. We show that the generated lattice pattern is consistent in the experiment and the simulation. We achieved a spatial resolution of 184  ±  28 nm, 244  ±  48 nm and 384  ±  20 nm in the x, y  and z directions, respectively for 2D-SIM in LLSM, with an exposure time of 5 ms for each phase per plane. For biological applications, we perform 2D-SIM in LLSM by imaging the dynamics of actin and membrane ruffling in a U2OS cell, with an exposure time of 20 ms per phase and two colors recorded for 121 optical-sectioning planes per 3D stack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positron emission tomography (PET) cameras are now in widespread use in hospitals. A model of a PET camera has been installed in Stockholm House of Science and is used to explain the principles of PET to school pupils as described here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Slovene Science competition for primary school students aged between 6 and 12 years will be explained briefly. The competition is based on experiments, which should be done well in advance either at school or at home. An example of the proposed experiment for 11 and 12 year old students from the past year—a syphon—will be presented as well as the assessment questions referring to this particular experiment, which were posed at the competition. A fair proportion of the population took part in the competition. We will present a brief analysis of the obtained data, which offers an insight into the difficulty level of the questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A memristor is the fourth fundamental electrical element, next to resistor, capacitor and inductor. This element has attracted the interest of the scientific and engineering communities during the last few years, due to the construction of such a device by the HP-Labs in 2008. Thus, theoretical, technological, as well as practical issues about memristors have emerged. One of the practical issues is the way that memristors will be introduced in the education procedure. In this frontline an initial approach of introducing memristor teaching in schools is proposed. This course proposal is based on lab inquiring activities and utilizes the simplest device exhibiting memristive characteristics, a light bulb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details of the London pilot of the ‘Discovery Project’ are presented, where university-based astronomers were given the chance to pass on some real and applied knowledge of astronomy to a group of selected secondary school pupils. It was aimed at students in Key Stage 3 of their education, allowing them to be involved in real astronomical research at an early stage of their education, the chance to become the official discoverer of a new variable star, and to be listed in the International Variable Star Index database (The International Variable Star Index, Version 1.1, American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), 2016, http://aavso.org/vsx), all while learning and practising research-level skills. Future plans are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a Physics DemoLab at the campus of National University of Singapore which holds a veritable treasure trove of physics equipment. It informs about several members of staff currently working at the DemoLab which includes Professor Sow Chorng Haur, Kim Yong Lim and Jianhong Kuang. It mentions that the lab offers a range of educational experiences which provide inspiration for educators. The lab runs programmes for primary, secondary and university students with an average of one session a day. It also mentions that questions regarding the physics experiments are explained by the working staff for increasing their curiosity to learn.

The article focuses on the process of water warming from 0 °C in a glass. An experiment is performed that analyses the temperature in the top and bottom layers of water during warming. The experimental equipment is very simple and can be easily set up using devices available in schools. The temperature curves obtained from the experiment help us to understand the process of convection in the glass and to determine the temperature at which the density of water is maximum. In addition, computational fluid dynamics—CFD modeling is carried out to facilitate better comprehension of the phenomenon observed in the experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]