Entries tagged education | Hugonweb Annotated Link Bibliography

https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0206210

A 2026 Physics Teacher paper by Eugene Hecht. Hecht wrote my intro physics textbook back in 2000.

I'm not sure the connection of Noether's theorem and Newton's laws is convincing, but the conceptual discussion of Noether's theorem is great.

Recall that invariance relates to the unchanging state of a quantity transferred between reference frames. Conservation relates to the unchanging state of a quantity in time, within a given reference frame. The two concepts are not equivalent.

I hadn't compared invariance and conservation before, and this is nice to think about.

https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4981034

This is a Physics Teacher paper by Pete Schwartz. Parallel pedagogy sounds especially nice for conceptual physics. I’m not sure how to join it to non-mechanics topics.

https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0248762

An article in The Physics Teacher by Dean A Stocker about writing his own textbook.

He uses the same textbook for conceptual and algebra-based intro physics. He uses some interesting ideas, including hand-drawing all figures, to encourage his students to draw diagrams themselves. I like that he color-codes quantities, e.g. momentum is always red.

The most radical thing:

The book uses parallel pedagogy, introducing the main concepts of motion, forces, momentum, and energy in the first chapter and gradually increasing the complexity of the physical scenarios. Nearly every two-page spread of the book is a complete analysis of a single physical scenario.

https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0254324

An article in The Physics Teacher by Jim Pantaleone about using an inexpensive gamma ray spectrometer in introductory lab. Example activities include measuring the radioactivity of a bag of potassium chloride pellets, observing backscatter from a lab table of a cesium-137 source, and estimating the efficiency of the spectrometer with a chunk of uranium ore.

https://students-residents.aamc.org/chemical-and-physical-foundations-biological-systems/chemical-and-physical-foundations-biological-systems-section-foundational-concept-4

This is a link to what the MCAT physics section is looking for. Useful for college physics-level teaching.

http://amasci.com/emotor/vdg.html

Bill Beaty's page on Van de Graaf generators. Make sure to look at page 2 and the other electrostatic pages.

https://edu.rsc.org/eic/section/exhibition-chemistry

A bunch of chemistry demos that could be useful for outreach.

https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/microscale-thermite-reaction

A neat demonstration of thermite with two rusty steel balls and a sheet of aluminum foil. See linked video.

https://www.humprog.org/%7Estephen/blog/highered/top-of-the-slops.html

In higher education, I'd argue our common goal, across all disciplines (we use that word for a reason) is to turn out humans who are less sloppy than they would otherwise be. At present LLMs stand to drive sloppiness upwards, because they are seen as ways to “relieve” humans of the tasks that deliver the real insights—the writing, programming and perhaps even proof through which we discover the ways in which what we previously thought was sloppy. When people don't go through that process of discovery, they don't get the skills to make them less sloppy. To become rigorous, you have to be confronted with your own sloppiness.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

https://hedy.org/

A programming curriculum meant to be a step between things like Scratch and Python. It gradually introduces concepts and syntax so the student isn't overwhelmed by e.g. punctuation. It also localizes keywords to a student's language, so e.g. print and for are translated into Chinese, Spanish, etc.

https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/fat-nums/

The idea is, rather than performing carries, just write down the "fat" number in its place.

For example, adding 1234 + 5678:

1  2  3  4
5  6  7  8
----------
6  8 10 12
6  8 11  2
6  9  1  2

The result is 6912.

Instead of carrying at each digit, you "normalize" at the end. This could be useful for elementary students struggling with the concept of carrying.