Physics is best learned by doing. Every movement, every motion, every action is an equation. Let's begin our explorations.
Welcome to your blog post. Our blog post. This is where we will highlight some new class experiences, work in the laboratory and just fun times in our physics class. Think of this as an ongoing conversation where your awesomeness will be available for you to see and share with friends and family.
This where your awesomeness can be shared.
I have many memories from different physics classes that are among my favorites. One of the most recent is from the 2018 school year. One of our challenges in class is to make connections between what we know as general knowledge with the details of science. In this lab investigation students were given the chance to use their creativity to explore and define the concept of buoyant force. But, "How can we be creative if we don't understand physics..." you ask?
Being creative in our explorations
Above: Investigating characteristics of buoyancy
We all know physics
It's intuitive to us.
From an early age we all gain understanding of how things work. We kick a soccer ball and know which direction it will move, how far it will go, and how hard to kick it to make this happen. Newton's laws of motion are our tools in this exercise. When we drop a ball, we learn that it will not always bounce back into our hands unless we push it or throw it down harder. A quick observation tells us that the type of surface, and material of the ball, affects the bounce back of the ball. Welcome to your understanding of conservation of momentum.
We slide down a hill when we are kids to just have fun, and we know that the height of the hill and how steep the hill is will determine how hard we hit the bottom. Yep, you were doing trigonometry in your minds eye as you slid down the hill yelling out your glee. We even discover the concept of friction, because of the different clothes we are wearing, or how slick the ground is with snow, water, grass, mud, etc. Throwing a baseball or football back and forth becomes a lesson on angles, force and momentum. All of this we discover and becomes intuitive to us.
Too early and too often in our lives we are taught to think of math and science as hard and only for those smart people. People inadvertently pass along their phobia of math to their peers, to their children and it somehow gets reinforced over the years of formal education. I know this might sound like conjecture on my part. But don't forget that I was a child once, a teenager struggling to make sense of my world, my friends, my family, my future, my whatever. I'm still in the process of figuring it all out. In physics class, however, we'll work together to figure things out and meet different challenges with increasing confidence as the semester progresses. We'll demystify the language and process of physics, and dispell those phobias of math and science. We're in this together.
Buckle up. Our learning is about to accelerate forward. :)
~thib