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…

We would like to share with you our ongoing experiences with "hands-on statistics" lessons we have recently carried out. We have developed a new experimental path for teaching young students using fundamental concepts of "statistics": uncertainty of the measurement, the uncertainty of the mean, the mean itself, etc. The methods…

Bulbs are considered to be very inefficient sources of light. Bulbs give light and heat. As we use them for a long time, especially in winter, a large part of the heat produced by bulbs lowers the power consumption of the heating system. In this paper the problem of the real efficiency of a bulb is solved when both the lighting and heating effects…

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…

Network for Astronomy School Education, NASE, is a project that is organizing courses for teachers throughout the entire world. The main objective of the project is to prepare secondary and primary school teachers in astronomy. Students love to know more about astronomy and teachers have the opportunity to observe the sky that every school has…

This paper describes a set of simple experiments with a very low cost using a notebook as a measuring instrument without external hardware. The major purpose is to provide demonstration experiments for schools with very low budgets. (Contains 6 figures.)

A context-based module to introduce secondary school students to the study of the optical properties of materials and geometric optics is presented. The module implements an innovative teaching approach in which the behaviour of the chosen application, in this article, the optical fibre, is iteratively explored and modelled by means of a…

In his "Two New Sciences" Galileo Galilei deals with the strength of objects, discussing how it changes with size. Our daily life offers many examples of effects due to change of dimensions and sometimes the consequences are unintuitive. This subject is really interesting for secondary school students and it can be presented through simple…

This article reports on an action research project undertaken with the primary aim of investigating the extent to which a feature film, whose plot included Tesla's demonstrations on the wireless transmission of electrical energy, can promote scientific enquiry. The class that participated in this project was an 11th grade class in a rural area of…

Inexpensive video analysis technology now enables students to make precise measurements of an object's position at incremental times during its motion. Such capability now allows users to "examine", rather than simply "assume", energy conservation in a variety of situations commonly discussed in introductory physics courses. This article describes…

The European Laboratory for Structural Assessment (ELSA) is one of the world's main laboratories for seismic studies. Besides its research activities, it also aims to bring applied science closer to the public. This article describes teaching activities based on a demonstration shaking table which is used to introduce the structural dynamics of…

A new procedure for performing quantitative measurements in teaching optics is presented. Application of the procedure to accurately measure the rate of change of the variable refractive index of a water-denatured alcohol mixture is described. The procedure can also be usefully exploited for measuring the constant refractive index of distilled…

A globe, in a school or university yard, which simulates the Earth's orientation in space, could be a very useful and helpful device for teaching physics, geometry, astronomy and the history of science. It would be very useful for science education to utilize the forthcoming International Year of the Planet Earth 2008 and the International Year of…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) require teachers to understand aspects of energy degradation and the second law of thermodynamics, including energy's availability and usefulness, changes in energy concentration, and the tendency of energy to spread uniformly. In an effort to develop learning goals that support teachers in…

We have developed two kinds of optical experiments: color mixture and fluorescence, using mini-torches with light emitting diodes (LEDs) that emit three primary colors. Since the tools used in the experiments are simple and inexpensive, students can easily retry and develop the experiments by themselves. As well as giving an introduction to basic…