Conceptual Dynamics is an innovative textbook designed to provide students with a solid understanding of the underlying concepts required to master complex dynamics problems. This textbook uses a variety of problem types including, conceptual, traditional dynamics, computer based and design problems. Use of these diverse problems strengthens students understanding of core concepts and encourages them to become more active in the learning process. Conceptual Dynamics has an extensive companion website (ConceptualDynamics.com) containing interactive quizzes and animations for students. At a net price of only $55 Conceptual Dynamics is the most affordable dynamics textbook available. Throughout this book, sets of “conceptual” problems are included that are meant to test the understanding of fundamental ideas presented in the text without requiring significant calculation. These problems can be assigned as homework or can be employed in class as exercises that more actively involve the students in lecture. When employed in class, these problems can provide the instructor with real-time feedback on how well the students are grasping the presented material. In order to assist the instructor, PowerPoint lecture slides are provided to accompany the book. Boxes are included throughout the text leaving places where students can record important definitions and the correct responses to the conceptual questions presented within the PowerPoint slides. In this sense, the book is meant to be used as a tool by which students can come to learn and appreciate the subject of dynamics. Students are further encouraged to be active participants in their learning through activities presented at the end of each chapter. These activities can be performed in class involving the students or as demonstrations, or can be assigned to the students to perform outside of class. These activities help the students build physical intuition for the sometimes abstract theoretical concepts presented in the book and in lecture. Along with the standard dynamics problems that are assigned as part of a student's homework, this book also includes computer based and design problems. The computer based problems in this book require the student to derive the equation of motion and to sometimes solve the resulting differential equation. The computer problems range from problems that may be completed using a spreadsheet to problems that require coding or a specialized software package (such as Mathematica, Maple, or MATLAB/Simulink). Design problems are included in each chapter in order to emphasize the importance of the material for students, as well as to get the students to think about real world considerations. The application of the fundamental subject material to various design problems helps students see the material from a different perspective. It will also help them solidify their understanding of the material. This textbook may be used as a standalone text or in conjunction with on-line lectures and effectively assist an instructor in “inverting the classroom”.

Conceptual Kinematics: A Companion to I. E. Irodov's Problems in General Physics. This work contains several variations of problems, solutions, methods, approaches related to Kinematics of I. E. Irodov's Problems in General Physics. These solutions strengthen and enliven the inherent multi-concepts including (but not limited to) analytics, graphical geometry, calculus, trigonometric geometry, scalar/vector algebra, differential equations, extrema without calculus to enrich the heritage set forth by I. E. Irodov. The present work will serve as a complete guide to private students reading the subject with few or no opportunities of instruction. This will save the time and lighten the work of Teachers as well. This book helps in acquiring a better understanding of the basic principles of Kinematics and in revising a large amount of the subject matter quickly. Care has been taken, as in the forthcoming ones, to present the solutions with multi-concepts and beyond in a simple natural manner, in order to meet the difficulties which are most likely to arise, and to render the work intelligible and instructive.

This work contains conceptual solutions to the problems and exercises given in the text book of Plane Trigonometry by S. L. Loney's including variations of problems, solutions, methods and approaches. These solutions strengthen and enliven the inherent multi-concepts to enrich the heritage set forth by S. L. Loney. The present work will serve as a complete guide to private students reading the subject with few or no opportunities of instruction. This will save the time and lighten the work of Teachers as well. This book helps in acquiring a better understanding of the basic principles of Plane Trigonometry and in revising a large amount of the subject matter quickly. Care has been taken, as in the forthcoming ones, to present the solutions with multi-concepts and beyond in a simple natural manner, in order to meet the difficulties which are most likely to arise, and to render the work intelligible and instructive.

This work contains conceptual solutions to the problems and exercises given in Chapters I-VI (Covering Straight Line) of S. L. Loney's Co-ordinate Geometry including variations of problems, solutions, methods and approaches. These solutions strengthen and enliven the inherent multi-concepts to enrich the heritage set forth by S. L. Loney. The present work will serve as a complete guide to private students reading the subject with few or no opportunities of instruction. This will save the time and lighten the work of Teachers as well. This book helps in acquiring a better understanding of the basic principles of Straight Line (Co-ordinate Geometry) and in revising a large amount of the subject matter quickly. Care has been taken, as in the forthcoming ones, to present the solutions with multi-concepts and beyond in a simple natural manner, in order to meet the difficulties which are most likely to arise, and to render the work intelligible and instructive.

This two-volume set LNCS 4805/4806 constitutes the refereed proceedings of 10 international workshops and papers of the OTM Academy Doctoral Consortium held as part of OTM 2007 in Vilamoura, Portugal, in November 2007. The 126 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 241 submissions to the workshops. The first volume begins with 23 additional revised short or poster papers of the OTM 2007 main conferences.

Conceptual change research investigates the processes through which learners substantially revise prior knowledge and acquire new concepts. Tracing its heritage to paradigms and paradigm shifts made famous by Thomas Kuhn, conceptual change research focuses on understanding and explaining learning of the most the most difficult and counter-intuitive concepts. Now in its second edition, the International Handbook of Research on Conceptual Change provides a comprehensive review of the conceptual change movement and of the impressive research it has spawned on students’ difficulties in learning. In thirty-one new and updated chapters, organized thematically and introduced by Stella Vosniadou, this volume brings together detailed discussions of key theoretical and methodological issues, the roots of conceptual change research, and mechanisms of conceptual change and learner characteristics. Combined with chapters that describe conceptual change research in the fields of physics, astronomy, biology, medicine and health, and history, this handbook presents writings on interdisciplinary topics written for researchers and students across fields.

The research in Physics Education has to do with the search of solutions to the complex problem of how to improve the learning and teaching of physics. The complexity of the problem lies in the different fields of knowledge that need to be considered in the research. In fact, besides the disciplinary knowledge in physics (which must be considered from the conceptual, the historical, and the epistemological framework), one has to take into account some basic knowledge in the context of psychology and the cognitive sciences (for the general and contextual aspects of learning) and some basic knowledge in education and comunication (for what concerns teaching skills and strategies). Looking back at the historical development of the research one may recognize that the complexity of the endeavour was not clear at first but became clear in its development, which shifted the focus of the research in the course of time from physics to learning to teaching. We may say that the research started, more than 30 years ago, with a focus on disciplinary knowledge. Physicists in different parts of the western world, after research work in some field of physics, decided to concentrate on the didactical comunication of physical knowledge.

The dynamics and systematicity of terminology: this book addresses these essential and intriguing aspects of terminology, by using quantitative methodologies which have been underutilized in the field to date. Through the analysis of the Japanese terminologies of six domains and with special reference to the dynamic behaviour and the status of borrowed and native morphemes, the book reveals: (a) how borrowed and native morphemes contribute to the construction of these terminologies, and how these contributions are likely to change as the terminologies grow; (b) how borrowed and native morphemes contribute to the systematicity or systematic representation of conceptual systems; and (c) how borrowed and native morphemes are related to each other and to what extent they are mixed in constructing terminologies. It also examines the epistemological implications of applying these quantitative methodologies, which leads back to such essential questions as the relationship between terminology as a whole and individual terms and what we understand terms to be when we talk about the growth of terminologies. The book should be of interest to a wide audience, including theoretical terminologists, terminographers, quantitative linguists, computational linguists, lexicologists and lexicographers.

The urge to understand all aspects of human experience more and better seems to be one of the motives underlying cognitive development in many domains of human existence. Understanding more and better is at the basis of knowledge creation and extension. One way of getting access to how understanding comes about and how knowledge is the result of a continuous dynamics of understanding and misunderstanding is by studying the cognitive potential and the development of natural language(s) and more particularly of terminology, in specialized domains. In this volume on dynamics and terminology, thirteen contributors illustrate that human cognition is a dynamic process in a variety of socio-cognitive and cultural settings. The case studies encompass a panoply of methodologies and deal with subjects ranging from the dynamics of legal understanding in multilingual Europe, over financial, economic and scientific terminology in several cultural and linguistic settings, to language policy issues in multilingual environments. All thirteen contributors link the dynamics of cognition to the creative potential of language as a repository of past and present experience in cultural settings and to the creation of neologisms in domain-specific languages. Attention is given to the functionality of indeterminacy, vagueness, polysemy, ambiguity, synonymy, metaphor and phraseology. In this volume terminology is researched and discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining insights developed over the last decades in communicative terminology, socio-terminology, socio-cognitive terminology, cultural terminology, with tools and methods from cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, frame semantics, semiotics, knowledge engineering and statistics.

The goal of this Volume "Conceptual Foundations of Materials: A standard model for ground- and excited-state properties" is to present the fundamentals of electronic structure theory that are central to the understanding and prediction of materials phenomena and properties. The emphasis is on foundations and concepts. The Sections are designed to offer a broad and comprehensive perspective of the field. They cover the basic aspects of modern electronic structure approaches and highlight their applications to the structural (ground state, vibrational, dynamic and thermodynamic, etc.) and electronic (spectroscopic, dielectric, magnetic, transport, etc.) properties of real materials including solids, clusters, liquids, and nanostructure materials. This framework also forms a basis for studies of emergent properties arising from low-energy electron correlations and interactions such as the quantum Hall effects, superconductivity, and other cooperative phenomena. Although some of the basics and models for solids were developed in the early part of the last century by figures such as Bloch, Pauli, Fermi, and Slater, the field of electronic structure theory went through a phenomenal growth during the past two decades, leading to new concepts, understandings, and predictive capabilities for determining the ground- and excited-state properties of real, complex materials from first principles. For example, theory can now be used to predict the existence and properties of materials not previously realized in nature or in the laboratory. Computer experiments can be performed to examine the behavior of individual atoms in a particular process, to analyze the importance of different mechanisms, or just to see what happen if one varies the interactions and parameters in the simulation. Also, with ab initio calculations, one can determine from first principles important interaction parameters which are needed in model studies of complex processes or highly correlated systems. Each time a new material or a novel form of a material is discovered, electronic structure theory inevitably plays a fundamental role in unraveling its properties. - Provides the foundations of the field of condensed matter physics - An excellent supplementary text for classes on condensed matter physics/solid state physics - Volume covers current work at the forefront - Presentations are accessible to nonspecialists, with focus on underlying fundamentals