Corrigendum: An educational path for the magnetic vector potential and its physical implications

Reply to Comment on ‘An educational path for the magnetic vector potential and its physical implications’

In this reply we respond to the comment made by Heras on our paper (Barbieri et al 2013 Eur. J. Phys. 34 1209), in which we presented an educational path on the magnetic vector potential A, aimed at undergraduate students and pre-service physics teachers.

Augmented lectures: Benefits of supporting physics teaching with the theatre

Abstract Young generations are less and less interested in studying STEM subjects. For this reason, numerous studies have strongly suggested a change in the methods scientific knowledge is developed in the learners, through the use of alternative and more creative strategies. In recent decades a strong interaction between scientific subjects and the arts has been established by means of theatre. The objective is to bring science to students and the public in ways that are engaging, instructive, artistic and, always, content-driven: the medium is the arts; the message is the joy of science. When we talk about Physics in a theatre show, are we only making a good dissemination or are we also t…

Strategies for Active Learning to Improve Student Learning and Attitudes Towards Physics

Over the last several years, active learning methods and strategies have received considerable attention from the educational community and are commonly presented in the related literature as a credible solution to the reported lack of efficacy of more “traditional” educative approaches. Research has shown that a possible factor is the strongly contextualized nature of active learning that focuses on the interdependence of situation and cognition. In this paper, we report the results of a Symposium with different contributions in the field of research on active learning. We start with a system analysis of the mental processes involved in learning physics which explains how active learning i…

Effects of emergency remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic on university physics students in Italy

We surveyed a convenience sample of 362 Italian university physics students, asking them to retrospectively assess their experience of emergency remote instruction due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We looked at their psychological well being, motivation for physics, academic orientation, attitude towards physics and physicists, and tried to link these factors to their overall perception of the online instruction. Our results show a general appreciation for the organization and effectiveness of online courses. However, online teaching negatively impacted on engagement and interaction between peers and with the instructors. Only 22% of students in our sample complained of the psychological distre…

An educational path for the magnetic vector potential and its physical implications

We present an educational path for the magnetic vector potential A aimed at undergraduate students and pre-service physics teachers. Starting from the generalized Ampere–Laplace law, in the framework of a slowly varying time-dependent field approximation, the magnetic vector potential is written in terms of its empirical references, i.e. the conduction currents. Therefore, once the currents are known, our approach allows for a clear and univocal physical determination of A, overcoming the mathematical indeterminacy due to the gauge transformations. We have no need to fix a gauge, since for slowly varying time-dependent electric and magnetic fields, the ‘natural’ gauge for A is the Coulomb o…