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In a fluctuating medium, whether of quantum, thermal, or non-thermal origins, an interaction is induced between external objects that modify the fluctuations. These interactions can appear in a vast variety of systems, leading to a plethora of interesting phenomena. Notable examples of these include:

1. like-charge attraction in the presence of multivalent counterions;

2. Ludwig–Soret effect in charged colloids;

3. mass renormalization of moving defects in a phononic background and moving metallic objects in electromagnetic quantum vacuum;

4. dissipation due to motion-induced radiation.

Another related class of problems corresponds to stirring the media by dynamic deformations of the embedded bodies and benefiting from the back-reaction of the stirred media for force generation, such as force generation in swimming. The fluctuation-induced forces are statistical in nature, and this could make their measurements very difficult, because the actual value of the force might deviate most of the time from the predicted average value.

As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous efforts and programs have been initiated throughout the educational chain to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the STEM field. On that background we sketch a framework to foster creative engagement in learning to promote scientific inquiry and modeling processes. In the theoretical part the article presents a dualistic perspective on the grounding of creative cognition in concrete experience, highlighting the productive and reflexive interplay of procedural and conceptual knowing. Their entanglement is pivotal to successful knowledge construction and application in science and technology. The ‘mechanics’ of creativity is elaborated exemplarily in a project based learning sequence that starts from investigating and modeling elastic forces as a basic paradigm of creative model construction. The creative part refers to conceptual expansions of the elastic spring model that assist in modeling emergent mechanical properties in hard and soft condensed matter. With additional moderate instructional input this knowledge is productive in creating basic models of the self-organized dynamics of biomolecular systems that orchestrate life at the cellular level. The sequence demonstrates how the interplay of hands-on experience and conceptual modeling can promote near and far transfer.