“Ask your students to take a picture to help them connect theoretical lecture content to the reality of their everyday life”! This is the title of a post I wrote for an issue on current technologies and their integration into teaching of the journal “Teaching in the Academy” that is being distributed to everybody who […]
Sometimes you need to look at the bigger picture to understand what is going on, especially when looking at phenomena on the water. My dad recently sent me the images below from Schleswig: Weird foamy stripes on the water. They don’t really make a lot of sense until you look at it from a different […]
When we watch rain falling on a water surface, we observe that each raindrop causes several concentric waves with different radii. In my post on Tuesday I just stated that that was what we observe, but today I want to look into the explanation. This is what it looks like when it rains on a water surface. Not much surprise […]
If waves spread equally in each direction along the water’s surface, then how come ships (or ducks) have wakes that are just those long lines of waves and not circular at all? So. Kids are typically familiar with what it looks like when you throw stuff in the water (for proof see below: my godchild on a […]
How well do people understand hydrostatics? I am preparing a workshop for tomorrow night and I am getting very bored by the questions that I have been using to introduce clickers for quite a lot of workshops now. So I decided to use the hydrostatic paradox this time around. The first question is the standard […]
Have you ever noticed champagne bubbles that form as a string right in the middle of the glass and hardly anywhere else? This leads to the very cool pattern you see here: Astrid and I recently happened to notice how differently bubbles in champagne and in mineral water behaved. In the mineral water, bubbles formed […]
After reading recently that I am being considered the queen of the melting ice cube (aaaaw, thank you!!!), having my movies of the experiment featured in Elin Darelius and Petra Langebroek’s article on “fun in the kitchen”, and hearing that the activity I posted on the “On The Cutting Edge”‘s website using the very same experiment has been […]
Using the “melting ice cube” experiment to let future instructors experience inquiry-based learning. I recently (well, last year, but you know…) got the chance to fill in for a colleague and teach part of a workshop that prepares teaching staff for using inquiry-based learning in their own teaching. My part was to bring in an experiment […]
One day last year I spotted the weirdest thing from my office window: A condensation trail of a plane whose captain clearly had the hiccups. See for yourself: Have a closer look below. Poor guy. And all the other pilots flying around him on nice and straight courses, only him hiccing… Happy April fool’s day!
