Posted: 18 October 2021
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Posted: 23 April 2021
Electricity, Magnetism and Electromagnetism are all much more closely inter-related than teaching orders, specifications and exams sometimes imply. Certainly the traditional order of teaching begins with the phenomena as clearly separate entities at Key stage 3.
In this article I hope to share some useful resources and help tie these topics closely together. The first one is, of course, the spark website produced by the institute of physics:
https://spark.iop.org/misconceptions?f%5B0%5D=search__misconceptions__domain%3A446#gref
Posted: 12 March 2021
Whilst most explanations of the tides “it’s the moon’s gravitational attraction” are readily accepted by all, there’s a very significant issue that often causes a lot of confusion. The trouble is, the tidal bulge is not only on the side facing the moon ie. the water is not simply “pulled up” by the Moon – there’s a lot more going on, as you can clearly see in this screenshot of the […]
Read morePosted: 5 March 2021
“Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways… their dancing is an actual indication of underlying movements of matter that are hidden from our sight… It originates with the atoms which move of themselves [i.e., spontaneously]. Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the […]
Read morePosted: 5 March 2021
Some ideas for the classroom…
Since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic I have been running a CPD session reasonably regularly called “Practicals in a time of pandemic”, this is a summary of that session along with anonymised contributions from other schools out there:
Tweak the sequencing so fiddly equipment such as the electrical circuit kit or microscopes stays in one bubble for a few weeks at a time, before quarantining for […]
Read morePosted: 26 February 2021
Medical imaging is a fantastic but often overlooked part of the Physics curriculum. On the 17/2/2021 I will be (was) talking about this a little as part of the IoP February festival. In order to support that I thought I’d pop some resources here:
Radiography
Radiography is very much a generic term for imaging technique using any radiation to view the internal form of an object. We usually default to meaning […]
Read morePosted: 11 December 2020
There are many jumping or springing toys that can really enliven a physics lesson – they can make some investigations much easier to manage and can illuminate the physics of energy stores.
The toy itself consists of a curved rubber disc that you invert. After a short time the toy pops and springs into the air. Other examples using base, a spring, a suction cup and a head are available and […]
Read morePosted: 20 November 2020
Optics – like many scientific terms the word has been co-opted in to many other uses. Most prominent at the moment in common usage must be as a political term. Ben Zimmer did some interesting work in uncovering the history as the On Language columnist at the Sunday New York Times Magazine. The first record appears to be from Jimmy Carter’s “inflation counselor,” Robert Strauss, who noted in 1978 that the president’s […]
Read morePosted: 18 November 2020
Viral toys especially are a teaching opportunity in physics.
One of the dangers of always “doing physics” with expensive equipment in lab conditions is that the subject looses it’s relevance, it becomes something that only happens in lab conditions. As a counter to this I encourage anyone to have a go at “found physics” and use teaching toys and pound-shop items to teach physics. There are some great examples out there and I’ll […]
Read morePosted: 13 November 2020
This blog post is based on the teaching materials I use in a CPD session that runs anything from an hour to a full day depending on the level of hands-on and the depth to which we explore the ideas, the pedagogy and how to embed it all in the curriculum. Because this post is intended to be reference and notes on teaching radioactivity it will always read in a fashion more […]
Read morePosted: 7 November 2020
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Read morePosted: 16 October 2020
Welcome to the first of a series on interesting bits of Teaching Physics. This blog is a repository for interesting things I want to share with the physics teaching community Some of these things will have popped up through my work delivering CPD with the IoP, or as part of our teacher or students outreach programme. A few will just be for the joy of it. Any requests happily […]
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