It is Open Evening time of year. Dan Toomey (@MrDToomey) joins us from Dublin to share what he does to entertain parents and students and also give some advice to Charlie the non-specialist who is starting to enjoy teaching Physics.

S02 E04 Timestamps

• Introducing Dan Toomey @ 00:48
• Open evenings @ 01:43
• What Should Charlie Do? @ 13:42
• Circus vs Carousel @ 18:02
• Dan’s Practicals in Memoriam @ 23:00
  • Planck’s constant with LEDs @ 23:07
  • Dropping a ball and timing it @ 27:31
• Please send in Ideas for teaching Ionising Radiation @ 31:24

Summary

Patrick, Robin and Thomas are joined by Dan Toomey in Dublin to dicuss open evenings and also to give more advice to Charlie the non-specialist who is working through forces. Dan loves the collapsing can experiment but also uses the Van de Graaf and this year is breaking out the Vacuum Cannon. Thomas likes splitting activities into ones to distract the students whilst parents talk to teachers and “show pieces”. Patrick says his “Open House” in the USA is nothing like UK Open Evenings at all!

Charlie’s been told that the kids are arriving with no books for his next lesson and is looking for ideas. Dan suggests doing a friction on different surfaces experiment and gathering the results on the board, whilst Thomas thinks giving out graph paper and concentrating on graphing skills might be the way to go.

We end the podcast by putting Dan on the spot for a Practical in Memoriam.

Ways to teach… Ionising Radiation

Please share your ideas about teaching Ionising Radiation. Tweet us @physicstp with the hash tag #tptpir , use the contact form below, our Instagram account @physics_teaching_podcast or email us contact at thephysicsteacohingpodcast dot com! After tweeting about this we already have seen a brilliant video about dealing with radiation issues in Russia (Thank you David Cotton @Newmanphysics).

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