The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has disrupted traditional educational strategies, presenting both challenges and opportunities for instructors. This exploratory study presents a pedagogical intervention where 1st-year university students engage in “teaching” LLMs to solve a physics problem, thereby reinforcing their conceptual understanding through the inherent cognitive benefits of teaching, capitalizing on the models' limitations to foster critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and promoting ethical use of AI in education. Post-activity feedback reveals students' nuanced perspectives on the role of AI in learning, offering insights for integrating these tools constructively into the classroom.

Misinformation is a critical global challenge with significant societal implications, including compromised decisionmaking and democratic processes. Higher education plays a vital role in equipping students with critical thinking skills to navigate misinformation effectively. This study investigates the application of inoculation theory—a psychological framework that builds resistance to persuasion through exposure to weakened doses of misinformation and its manipulative techniques—in a higher education context. A one-week intervention was integrated into a competency-based general education course, involving 135 second-year college students from diverse disciplines. A multitechnique approach combining passive and active strategies was employed, including lectures, case studies, video presentations, interactive games, and expert-led discussions. Pre- and post-intervention assessments measured the students' ability to identify misinformation, gauge confidence levels, and evaluate their willingness to share misleading content. Using confirmatory factor analysis and measurement invariance frameworks, we validated the construct of misinformation identification as a latent trait. The results revealed a statistically significant improvement in students' ability to discern manipulative content, confirming the effectiveness of the inoculation-based intervention. The findings underscore the potential of multifaceted inoculation strategies to enhance critical thinking and misinformation resilience, providing a model for broader applications in educational settings. This work advances both the theoretical understanding of inoculation theory and its practical implementation in fostering informed decision-making and resilience against misinformation in a digitally complex era.

Critical thinking is an important skill that professionals of all disciplines must possess. In this work, a case study where a group of students undertook a sciences and technology course with the goal of developing critical thinking is presented. Particularly, whether the students developed skills after the course was assessed by using the standardized “Watson-Glaser” critical thinking test. When comparing the performances, it was found that the mean score increased by around 4 in a scale from 0 to 100. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was conducted to assess normality, followed by a Wilcoxon and a Multi-factor Analysis of Variance, to determine statistical significance. It was found that the scores did not follow a normal-behavior, and that results are statistically significant, based on critical p and F values. Therefore, it was concluded that the sciences and technology course helped students develop critical thinking skills.

The teaching-learning process in an Engineering thermodynamics course benefits from laboratory components as experiential learning activities. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic brought difficulties for the use of experiential learning in lab-based topics. This work describes the results from implementing an at-home non-traditional laboratory, where the students had to design and build a prototype to conduct experiments and analyse results. Results indicate positive learning outcomes and both acceptance and satisfaction from the students; the students had a mean mark of 89.22; comparatively, the previous year in-person overall mean mark was 87.98. Moreover, from a conducted student experience survey, in terms of overall satisfaction, the obtained score was 9 out of 10, while when the module was taught in-person the average score was 9.1.

A defining feature of quantum mechanics is that it allows systems to exist in a superposition of different eigenstates of certain observables such as position or spin. However, superpositions of other quantities such as mass or charge are not seen in nature. It is thought that this disparity is partly due to the fact that it is much easier to carry out interference experiments for certain observables than others. Here we present an interferometry scheme that should allow us to observe interference between the vacuum and a single photon or atom. We begin by presenting a scheme for a Hadamard gate that operates in the Fock state basis and then show how, by creating an interferometer from two such gates, interference between a single particle and the vacuum could indeed be observed. This would provide evidence of a superposition of different particle numbers.