Science education
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2024
1 article2023
2 articles- Can a Planet Have a Moon? Teaching Exomoon Detection with a Disco Ball Motor Every classroom treatment of exoplanet detection focuses on the transit method. What gets omitted is that moons of exoplanets could also host life — and that with a small motor and a slight modification to the standard transit experiment, you can show students what an exomoon signature looks like in a light curve. Published in MNU Journal in 2023.
- Fremde Welten: Teaching Exoplanet Detection in the Secondary School Classroom A unit for lower secondary physics classes (grades 8–10) on detecting exoplanets with analogy experiments. Published in Unterricht Physik in 2023, it starts where students’ misconceptions are — with the (wrong) assumption that you can just look at exoplanets through a telescope — and works forward from there.
2022
1 article2021
2 articles- They Told Me Not to Use Design Thinking. They Were Right. I treated a design workflow as though it were a complete research methodology. Grounded-theory techniques would have made my analysis of unexpected student responses more systematic. That is a postmortem of this thesis, not a universal verdict against design-based research.
- Mission to Mars: Teaching Air Pressure with a Smartphone and a Vacuum Pump 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 2022, and one of the more memorable experiments I have been part of running.