Bathroom physics
During the course of a one hour lesson some students will always feel the need to visit the bathroom thereby missing out on some of the lesson. What could be better than making it possible to continue...
Spoiling the punchline
On Friday I was doing transmission of electrical power with my HL class and set off on my usual example to show how much power would be lost if it was transmitted at a lower voltage. Unfortunately I chose...
Liquid Crystal Discussion
I quite often find that the simple explanations necessary to answer IB questions aren't quite enough to answer students questions in class. Today we were talking about how the LCD works. The liquid crystal...
Thick with satellites
The other day I was looking for an illustration to show how many satellites there were orbitting the Earth. I didn't manage to find what I was looking for which was an image I'd seen in the science museum,...
Where's Richard
The other day I was playing with some old CDs. Sticking them to a spring so the end could be sensed by a motion sensor. While doing this I noticed that there were some interesting fringe patterns where...
Who are Pink Floyd?
It could be the start of a new trend, wearing T-shirts to match the topic. I saw this one during the summer holiday and just had to buy it to wear when my class do the flying pig practical. I was wondering...
Only try this at home
Do you ever embark on something on the board and suddenly wish you hadn't? Today I did. I was doing about the gravitational field around two spherical masses and for some reason decided to draw the variation...
Hammers cracking nuts (warning new syllabus spoiler)
I don't have a photo of it because its not there any more but I used to have a sink at the front of my Lab. It wasn't exactly right in front of the SMARTboard but it did get in the way. Last week it got...
Reeyookan gets big mirror
The photo isn't of Rjukan (or Reeyookan as the BBC reporter says) it's of the college I work at (taken from my study window) however we do have a shared problem with Rjukan; in the winter, part of the...
Bakhita's twang
Today my class was doing a design experiment with a plastic ruler as the theme. This normally gives rise to a variety of research questions of which several are always related to twanging the ruler on...