Light bulb update

Here's an update on my last post for Y13 Physics class about SHM teaching - what I planned to try to get the students to understand better.

The restoring force was fairly easy to comprehend and helped them understand, so they now know that the force will always oppose any motion away from the equilibrium. The suggestion from Maria (Thanks 🙂) reminded me of a very useful tool and we now have it saved as a bookmark for regular use in all topics.

Working on Phasors now.

Y 11 Practical activities - some thoughts and concerns.

The class is getting bigger and is at 30 students now. Getting a practical activity done with this group seems to be a challenge. We do not want any health & safety hazards when we are working with chemicals.

It does not get easier after the lunch break and so I should keep the practical activities to the morning lessons.  Some of the students turn up late after lunch and the  groups have to be reorganised according to the change in numbers.
What I am planning to do is:

• have a fixed number in each group
• have gear organised for a certain number of groups
• do a practice run with the experiment before introducing any strong chemicals.

Will try and get a practical activity in the next week and see how it goes. 

Light bulb idea

Today in the Y13 Physics class we were discussing Simple Harmonic Motion and I was explaining to the group about the direction of force and how it is always opposing the motion. There were too many variables: distance from equilibrium, direction of motion, velocity etc. This proved very confusing and some students got it but a few were still confused when asked the same questions using different scenarios. It was getting exhausting for them trying to understand, and me to explain. This was stuck in my head - I neeed to get them to understand this...but how....


Thinking about it now - I feel that if I had used the term "restoring force" that would make it easier to understand/explain. This is because by definition restoring means bring back, replace, etc.  People learn in different ways. Will see how we go in the next class, but seems like this should definitely work.