Many students in secondary schools consider the sciences difficult and unattractive. This applies to physics in particular, a subject in which students attempt to learn and understand numerous theoretical concepts, often without much success. A case in point is the understanding of the concepts current, voltage and resistance in simple electric circuits. In response to these problems, reform initiatives in education strive for a change of the classroom culture, putting emphasis on more authentic contexts and student activities containing elements of inquiry. The challenge then becomes choosing and combining these elements in such a manner that they foster an understanding of theoretical concepts. In this article we reflect on data collected and analyzed from a series of 12 grade 9 physics lessons on simple electric circuits. Drawing from a theoretical framework based on individual (conceptual change based) and socio-cultural views on learning, instruction was designed addressing known conceptual problems and attempting to create a physics (research) culture in the classroom. As the success of the lessons was limited, the focus of the study became to understand which inherent characteristics of inquiry based instruction complicate the process of constructing conceptual understanding. From the analysis of the data collected during the enactment of the lessons three tensions emerged: the tension between open inquiry and student guidance, the tension between students developing their own ideas and getting to know accepted scientific theories, and the tension between fostering scientific interest as part of a scientific research culture and the task oriented school culture. An outlook will be given on the implications for science lessons.
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Charging an electric vehicle needs to be as simple as possible for the user. He needs to park his car, plug his vehicle and identify to start charging. There is no need to understand the technology and protocols needed to reach this simple task.For the students and researchers of the Amsterdam University of Applied Science (AUAS / HvA), there is a need to understand as deep as possible all the techniques involved in this technology.The purpose of this document is to give to the reader the information he needs to understand how an electric car can be charged and how he can use these knowledges to analyses and interpret data.
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Electrohydrodynamic atomization (EHDA) is a technique which uses the influence of strong electric fields to manipulate the break-up of a liquid, pumped through a capillary nozzle, into droplets. In this work, an extended description of a specific high flow EHDA mode, known as the simple-jet mode, is presented. In it, a review of different works published about the mode is presented as well as results about the droplet population generated with varicose and whipping break-up using water as the atomized liquid. Additionally, experiments were conducted to investigate whether such atomization method could be used to improve the efficiency of droplet inair evaporation, using a single effect evaporation chamber coupled with a EHDA multinozzle system functioning as a shower head. The liquid used in these experiments was a solution of water and NaCl (35 g L−1) to simulate sea water average concentrations. The results have shown that, the manipulation of the droplet diameter, droplet size distribution and spray angle, provided by EHDA, could improve the droplet evaporation efficiency by up to 40% when combinedwith, e.g. forced convection and higher inlet temperatures.
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