Jerking around
A car travelling along a straight road has constant acceleration from rest followed by a period of constant velocity finally braking to a stop. Sketch the displacement time graph. I gave this to my students...
After thought
It doesn't often happen but sometimes what we do in physics ties in nicely with what they do in maths, as a result my students seem to know all about parabolas. Today they even had two consecutive tests...
Masters of the Universe
This could be the first time I've understood a film better than my wife. On Saturday night we watched the BBC docu-drama Hawking. This is the story of Stephen Hawking's time at Cambridge working on his...
Pascopile
It's raining in Flekke so I decided to try and work out what's going on with my PASCO interfaces and converters (see previous blog post). As you can see in the photo I go them all out and started trying...
Goldilocks and the three bears
Yesterday I was going through moderation of neutrons in fission reactors with my HL students. I wanted them to consider what makes a good moderator, so got talking about collisions between a small particle...
Mix and match
The little chappy in the photo is no ordinary cable its a USB converter that costs about 1000 Norwegian Kroner, a vital link between my old PASCO science workshop interfaces and a modern day computer....
Carpet crawlers
Some of the best ideas for design labs use the simplest equipment but I hadn't realised we could do without chairs and tables, in fact they are not even in the lab. Better not tell the director of studies...
Oliver's twist
Oliver, a student who completed his IB last May, posted an interesting observation on facebook. He obviously hasn't started lectures yet at Uni so has been sitting in his room bouncing a ball off the...
Every silver lining
Yesterday I got back home from Turkey. I'd been running a workshop on IA for gp4 teachers. Taking a flight home at 4am doesn't seem too drastic but leaving the hotel at 1:30 was. When I got back to Flekke...
Thwarted by traffic
I was going to write a post about the way people fish in Turkey so I went to cross the road to get a picture. Unfortunately the road was so busy that I only got as far as the central reservation and had...