Although nearly everyone is familiar with colors from an early age and the fundamentals of color mixing are taught at various abstraction levels throughout kindergarten to high school, we repeatedly observe that our student teachers in physics have problems in explaining the subject. Therefore, we propose an experimental setup that focuses on the…

Dark matter comprises most of the matter in the universe, yet physicists are unsure of its nature. A significant effort is devoted in contemporary research to attempts to understand dark matter, making it a both captivating and relevant area of astrophysics to discuss in a classroom setting. What is more, the physics behind these experiments is…

Our motivation for this article is for students to realize that opportunities for discovery are all around them. Discoveries that can still puzzle present day researchers. Here we explore an observation by a middle school student concerning the production of what appears to be water-like "ripples" produced in aluminum foil when placed…

In the school year 2012-2013 about 50 students (Fig. 1), managed by mentors (teachers from the middle school Gimnazija Vic in Ljubljana, Slovenia) created an atmospheric probe and launched it into an altitude of more than 30 km above Earth's surface. The aim of this "space expedition" was to take pictures of Earth and to measure how air…

An activity called "Project Physics, a Classroom Without Walls" was started during the spring of 2003 at the amusement park in Mirabilandia (Italy). Many thousands of students from Italian middle and high schools are today participating in the initiative. Under the guidance of trained tutors, they perform physics experiments on some of…