Study Guide

The all new study guide is now available in English (SL and HL) and Spanish. The Spanish translation was done by one of my former students Teresa Irigoyen Lopez currently doing a PhD at Cambridge university on energy system optimisation. I remember when she was a student she always laughed at my jokes so is well placed to make sense of the sometimes hidden humour in my writing. The guide goes very well with the activities but I would discourage students from using it as a source of answers when doing an activity. The activities encourage the student to develop their understanding by answering a series of questions the study guide gives explanations rather than asking questions. Some students like to read the study guide before doing an activity others prefer to read it after, either is fine but if they refer to the guide in order to answer the questions in the activity they don't need to use their brain and that's not a good thing. When I used to teach from the board some of my students would have my textbook open at the same time, they would always be able to answer my questions. Sometimes they would point out that I had just said exactly what was in the book, well I did write it!

The Spanish version only covers the SL core but the plan is to translate the AHL material then, provided we get some Spanish speaking subscribers Teresa will translate all of the multiple choice questions that go with the text. Unlike most text books the ThinkIB study guide does not contain any problems as these are to be found elsewhere on the site. We plan to add links to the relevant problems and multiple choice questions in the near future.

Since there are no options this year, they have not been covered in the guide. The options will be disappearing in the new syllabus but a substantial part of engineering relativity and astrophysics will be added to the core. Over the next year I will write chapters for these options so we will be ready to roll out a study guide for the new syllabus when the time comes.

Here are a couple of example pages 4.2-4.5 Transverse and longitudinal waves   4.2-4.5 Ondas transversales y longitudinales. As you can see I have had a lot of fun creating animations to clarify my explanations and I'm not joking, it is fun, if it wasn't I wouldn't do it.