Many authors suggest that is necessary to include the most important episodes from physics history in teaching and learning in order to give students some ideas about the nature of science. The pendulum-related aspects are considered as very adequate for that purpose. Unfortunately, when some physics textbook authors present historical…

We look at the problem of the minimum speed of projectiles in a constant gravitational field. In the absence of resistance, the problem may be studied in the frame of a high school curriculum. One needs only Newton's laws and a minimum amount of analytic geometry to compute the orbit, which turns out to be parabolic. Furthermore, in case the…

In this research, we gave to technical university students (N=50) and high school students (N=75) a verbally described situation of a partially defined physics problem. The task for the both groups of the students was to generate drawings of how they imagined the situation that the problem referred to. A fully abstract drawing was generated by 48%…

New media technology becomes more and more important for our daily life as well as for teaching physics. Within the scope of our N.E.T. research project we develop experiments using New Media Experimental Tools (N.E.T.) in physics education and study their influence on students learning abilities. We want to present the possibilities e.g. of…

Solving the position of a simple pendulum at any time is apparently one of the most simple and basic problems to solve in high school and college physics courses. However, because of this apparent simplicity, teachers and physics texts often assume that the solution is immediate without pausing to reflect on the problem formulation or verifying…

A simple experiment demonstrating the excitation of a standing wave in a metal string is presented here. Several tasks using the set-up are considered, which help the students to better understand the standing waves, the interaction between electric current and magnetic field and the resonance phenomena. This can serve also as a good lecture…

University and high school students not pursuing a science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics (STEM) course of study demonstrate less developed scientific reasoning than their STEM-based peers. Previous studies show that the majority of non-STEM students can be classified as either concrete operational or transitional reasoners in…

This paper shows the scientific foundations of a natural phenomenon of undoubted interest and applicability in our day, fluorescence, and its possibilities for teaching at three educational levels: primary, secondary and university. It begins by describing the nature of the phenomenon and continues by explaining how we work with students of the…

In this article a thin optical lens model is considered. It is shown that the limits of its applicability are determined not only by the ratio between the thickness of the lens and the modules of the radii of curvature, but above all its geometric type. We have derived the analytical criteria for the applicability of the model for different types…