A moment-by-moment analysis of a successful case of students generating and running a model of permanent magnetism

Within PER, case studies of successful physics learning are important for many reasons, including because they provide insight into curricular development.Additionally, from a theoretical perspective, examples of successful learning as demonstrated through microgenetic analyses of moment-by-moment shifting priorities of intuitions, can also contribute to the Knowledge in Pieces (KiP) framework by providing empirical evidence for the KiP learning mechanism.Here we present a moment-by-moment analysis of a case of successful learning in which we see how intuitions about translational symmetry, scaling symmetry, and how magnets work, i.e., they have opposite poles that attract or repel, are raised and lowered as students develop and run a model of permanent magnetism that is substantively similar to the canonical model.