When you are a physicist doing education research, methodology feels like a bureaucratic formality standing between you and the interesting work. Everyone told me to use grounded theory instead of design thinking in my thesis. I ignored them. This is the postmortem.
You give students a vacuum pump, a bag of household materials, and a smartphone running phyphox. Their task: build a spaceship prototype that will survive the pressure difference between the crew compartment and space. A design-based inquiry experiment published in The Physics Teacher in 2021, and one of the more memorable experiments I have been part of running.
In September 2020 I gave a teacher training talk on stellar formation and the misconceptions students bring into class. The misconception list was long enough to be its own document. Here it is, with commentary. Includes: the Sun as a heat-planet, gravity that only works when things move, metals that always existed, and the obligatory complaint about quantum leaps.
ViLLA is an online portal of real classroom videos built for teacher education at the University of Cologne. The idea sounds straightforward. Getting there required filming actual lessons, building infrastructure, surviving a quasi-experiment, and eventually convincing the federal government that this was worth scaling. Some notes on how that went.
An introduction to this blog: scientific ideas too lazy to submit, peer review openly invited, criticism will be posted.