When teaching a general education introductory astronomy course that includes a mathematics prerequisite, it is important to convey that formulas and equations physically represent properties of actual objects and processes that occur that can actually be observed. Students with varying comfort levels with mathematics often need to be convinced…

The phyphox app has demonstrated itself to be useful and impressive for physics teaching. The app is free to download and has so many features that it seems it may be particularly helpful in this time of distance learning. Phyphox (pronounced to sound like "physics") works for Android and Apple phones, and there are many experiments…

Climate is a topic of great concern to students, but it remains difficult to discuss scientifically. We are bombarded daily by emotional messaging for and against the proposition that human activities are altering the climate in ways that may have catastrophic effects. But it often seems that those predictions rest entirely on massive computer…

Undergraduate physics programs are increasingly facing pressure from university and college administration, industry, and funding agencies to improve training of our undergraduates. Increasingly, tertiary institutions have redefined their graduate profiles and mission statements to encompass more than just content knowledge, including skills that…

Abundant research leaves little question that pedagogical approaches involving active student engagement with the material, and opportunities for student-to-student discussions, lead to much better learning outcomes than traditional instructor-led, expository instructional formats, in physics and in many other fields. In introductory college…

Video lectures are increasingly being used in physics instruction. For example, video lectures can be used to "flip" the classroom, i.e., to deliver, via the Internet, content that is traditionally transmitted by in-class lectures (e.g., presenting concepts, working examples, etc.), thereby freeing up classroom time for more interactive…

This article has two goals: (1) To convince you that you should use web-based videos outside of class for the transmissive, but necessary, portions of your lectures, and (2) to convince you that "you can do this yourself without an unreasonable burden of time or effort."

Demonstrating probabilistic outcomes using real-time data is especially well-suited to larger lecture classes where one can generate large data sets easily. The difficulty comes in quickly collecting, analyzing, and displaying the information. With the advent of wireless polling technology (clickers), this difficulty is removed. In this paper we…

In my previous article on apparatus named after physicists and physics teachers, I discussed five relatively common pieces of apparatus from the 1875-1910 era. Now I will go back to the 18th and early-19th centuries to discuss eponymous apparatus that we are still using in lecture demonstrations. [For Part I, see EJ912907.]

More and more physics instructors are making use of personal/classroom response systems or "clickers." The use of clickers to engage students with multiple-choice questions during lecture and available instructor resources for clickers have been well documented in this journal. Newer-generation clickers, which I refer to as classroom response…

My teaching and textbook have always covered many physics-related social issues, including stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming. The ozone saga is an inspiring good-news story that's instructive for solving the similar but bigger problem of global warming. Thus, as soon as students in my physics literacy course at the University of…

It's always hard to know what to expect when bringing computers into an educational setting, as things are always changing. Student skills with computers are different today than they were 10 years ago, and 20 years ago almost counts as an alien world. Still, one hopes that some of these changes result in positive trends, such as student attitudes…

Interactive lecture demonstrations (ILDs) are a powerful tool designed to help instructors bring state-of-the-art teaching pedagogies into the college-level introductory physics classroom. ILDs have been shown to improve students' conceptual understanding, and many examples have been created and published by Sokoloff and Thornton. We have used the…

Digital lecturing systems (computer and projector, often with PowerPoint) offer physics instructors the ability to incorporate graphics and the power to share and reuse materials. But these systems do a poor job of supporting interaction in the classroom. For instance, with digital presentation systems, instructors have limited ability to…

The technology of podcasting, or creating audio or video files that can be subscribed to over the Internet, has grown in popularity over the past few years. Many educators have already begun realizing the potential of delivering such customized content, but most efforts have focused on lecture-style humanities courses or multimedia arts courses.…