This paper gives an overview of nine different Virtual School Garden Exchange (VSGE) projects. In VSGEs, learners from primary or secondary schools with school gardens exchange virtually on their garden experiences and related topics, using digital media like emails, photos, films, or videoconferences. In this manner, the global perspective of…

A technique is described for calculating the brightness of the atmosphere of the Earth that shines into the Earth's umbra during a total lunar eclipse making the Moon red. This "Rim of Fire" is due to refracted unscattered light from all the sunrises and sunsets rimming the Earth. In this article, a photograph of the totally eclipsed…

This paper describes an innovative assignment in which students associate marketing concepts with artwork from a specified photographic exhibit. During the encoding process, linking various topics with pieces of art activates high-involvement learning, creative elaboration, and analytical reasoning. Consequently, students experience higher levels…

Linguistic landscape studies increasingly focus on the variables that intertwine to generate the meaning of texts on display. International tourist resorts, largely multilingual, reveal how languages in signage combine and respond to the sociolinguistic profile of their readership. However, these settings have received scant attention in the…

Our high school optics course finishes with an assignment that students usually appreciate. They must take pictures of everyday situations representing optical phenomena such as reflection, refraction, or dispersion, and post them on Instagram. When the photos were presented to the class, one student revealed an intriguing photo, similar to Fig.…

A few years ago it was suggested that the distance to celestial bodies could be computed by tracking their position over about 24 hours and then solving a regression problem. One only needed to use inexpensive telescopes, cameras, and astrometry tools, and the experiment could be done from one's backyard. However, it is not obvious to an amateur…

Efforts to conserve and preserve the environment in developing or marginalized locales frequently involve a one-way transfer of knowledge and materials from a source in a more developed location. This situation often degenerates into a short-term donor project which risks little to no long-term impacts on local or indigenous relationships with the…

Radical political activism in the 1970s and 1980s had a huge impact on documentary photography in Britain. Community organisations and photography collectives emerged and endeavoured to democratise the arts for those who would not otherwise have come into contact with them. Community photography used the technology to break down the barriers…

A very old and well-known magical trick is the so-called tablecloth pull. A table is covered with a tablecloth, on top of which are certain objects. The task is to remove the tablecloth while the objects--which must not be touched--stay on top of the table. This article describes the physics behind the experiment, and presents examples recorded…

Drawing on a community-university (CU) partnership between a non-profit organization that serves teen families, a housing organization and a university, this paper discusses the opportunities and challenges that can arise when engaging vulnerable youth in research. Through this paper, we share reflections on promising practices and ethical…

Recently, concern over firefighter health and wellness in the United States has escalated due to increasing obesity rates, on-duty cardiovascular event risk, and job stress. A range of barriers to health and wellness have been identified within firefighter culture, but the way these barriers manifest in firefighters' lives is not well-understood.…

In this study, data on grades awarded for bachelor and master theses at a large Polish university were used to identify possible discrimination on gender or physical attractiveness. The focus is on the gap between the grades awarded by the advisor (who knows the student personally) and the referee (who typically does not, so that gender is less…

With the advancement of digital technology, software and applications are overwhelmingly accessible to teachers and students. Digital designs for teaching and learning are highly encouraged by scholars as they prepare students of today for the demands of the future workforce. Thus, many educators use available social networks for their classrooms.…

We investigated the impact of inquiry instruction within a well-established, yearlong, studio-focused high school student program based at a contemporary art museum in the southwestern United States. The pretest and posttest focused students' attention on the work of two different contemporary artists and used the same prompts to solicit student…

In this paper, we analyze a PhotoVoice project -- the Belonging Project that included 22 youth co-researchers and three researchers from the University of British Columbia. The project focused on concepts of belonging and exclusion and resulted in recommendations to a school district in Canada, a photo exhibit, and two of the co-researchers being…