Sea slugs use physics to move up to 90 km a day. Who’d have known? In the main body of the podcast Robin talks to Nicky Thomas about teaching diffraction. She has much to share so we released an extended interview podcast Finally woodlice can also assist in physics teaching by being a source of real distance/time data.

Timestamps

• Our secret plans @ 00:30
• Plea for people to share their ideas about how to teach distance, speed and acceleration @ 1:54
• Physics in the News: Sea Cucumber escape strategy @ 2:55
• Nicky Thomas on Diffraction @ 5:09
• Biologist Sylvia and using Woodlice to teach Physics @ 19:07

Summary

Robin and Thomas are excited about their secret plans for the weekend that are related to the future “Ways to teach…” episode on distance, speed and acceleration. Thomas then tells Robin about escapologist sea slugs that use their deep knowledge of physics to move up to 90km a day. The main guest this week is teacher Nicky Thomas. Her favourite thing to teach is diffraction and she describes how she tries to make it a progressive subject through the key stages. Nicky told Robin how she explores diffraction with different age groups and give some context for how it is used in industry by Panalytical. Thomas from the future appears to tell the listener that the interview had to be cut hard, but you can hear the whole half hour on a special bonus podcast that has been released The last part of the podcast is an idea linked to distance, speed and acceleration: using woodlice as a source of real distance time information. This is described by an old colleague of Thomas’, Sylvia Gummery.

Ways to teach… Distance, Speed and Acceleration

Episode 20 (assuming we make it) will be all about ways to teach distance, speed and acceleration (or displacement, velocity and acceleration). How do you do it and what works best for you?

Join in!

Please share ideas or successes – or indeed questions – on our Facebook Page: https://fb.me/physicstp .  You can also message us via our website contact form at the.physicsteachingpodcast.com, Twitter @physicstp, email using  the address given in the podcast (if we remember), you could even email us an autio file if you are feeling really keen.

Music

• Season 5: Crescents by Ketsa.
• Seasons 3 and 4: Disco Sheik by Podington Bear.
• Seasons 1 and 2: One legged equilibrist polka by Circus Homunculus.
• Occasionally we also use Cantina Rag by Jackson F. Smith.

The music is used under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License