Day+2


 * Day 2: What is physics?**
 * <>day 3>> ||

Day 2 considered different ways to define physics, considering different audiences and differenet contexts for the definition. Groups came up with some fascinating insights and some forays into philosophical questions about science and knowledge. The broad summary seemed to find the group on a quest to better understand the rules governing the physical universe and its phenomena through compehensible models and analysis.

We moved on through Fermi questions, some links below, as a technique for encouraging risk-averse students to make assumptions and feel secure in 'playing' with numbers. Like any technique for teaching and learning, Fermi questions take practice (for teacher and student alike) to be useful and to start to affect the mindset of students.

From Fermi questions to thinking about units of space and time, we thought about the largest and smallest units of distance and time that we can directly experience. This, once again, led us on an interesting philosophical excursion into the nature of experience - is there a point at which we experience distance purely as the time that it takes us to traverse it? And can we truly experience time? This made our brains hurt a bit so we segued into a competition to name the most units of length and time which uncovered an impressive knowledge of archaic units such as rod, chain and Freddy. Sorry, cubit.

This led us on to thinking about making very large and very small numbers meaningful. Some examples: Thinking about the mole in terms of graph paper spread out over the surface of th Earth, using Google maps as a visualisation aid and in turn using that to appreciate just how small an atom is (and thus just how astonishing the sight of a cloud chamber should be). Considering the distance between planets in the solar system as car or aeroplane journeys, using the fact that the speed of sound and the speed of light differ by a factor of approximately one million. Here's a great place to use the wiki. If you have other good ways to make very large or very small numbers real to your students, use the discussion for this page to share them!

In the afternoon session we looked at some very simple forces experiments and considered what constitiutes a physics explanation. Realising that we can take every explanation to a deeper level, we considered the importance of consistent use of models and referring explanations to other areas of physics. Finally, we revisited some of the questions from the diagnostic exercise, revealing a couple of interesting popular misconceptions. More on these here.

Fermi Questions: [|**Fermi questions - math forum**] [|Extensive list of Fermi questions] Gatsby study of Fermi question use in primary schools

A great book on numbers, not physics but based around statistics in the news and a great one for using with your students is The Tiger that Isn't by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot; also check out their [|"More or Less"] programme on the BBC. A little more technical, for those of you who want to look at statistics in science in more depth is "Lady Tasting Tea" by David Salsburg.

This is a link from SciToys, a website that you'll return to again and again to make gadgets for your physics teaching. I love it. How to make a gaussian gun

PowerPoint presentation from day 2: