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15. Water, Waves and Woodlice
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 […]
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14. Cataracts, Cameras and (CERN) Competitions
Thomas and Robin respond to a request from a listener and investigate the BL4S Competition run by CERN. Win an all expenses trip to a high energy beam lab where you will be supported to do your own experiment. They also announce the subject of the next “Ways to teach…” episode: Distance, Speed and Acceleration. […]
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13. Lasers, Labs and a Large(r) hadron collider
Thomas and Robin had such fun talking to Patrick Kaplo (Episode 11) from Windham, New Hampshire that we talked to him again about his Challenge Labs. These are graded practicals where there is a one-shot event at the end of the practical that gives you your final grade. You can listen to how this works […]
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12. Shrink-Rays, Spectrum and String…
Thomas and Robin discuss (not) Shrink Rays and mysterious (not Alien) Space signals before getting on to the meat of the podcast: Teaching the EM Spectrum and using the simple question “How long is a piece of String?” to explore measurement, errors and uncertainty.
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11. Poppers, Pendulums and Pond-hopping
The days are getting longer, and the monster Christmas term is behind us. Thomas and Robin refuse to let January blues dull the joy of physics teaching as they kick 2019 off with a cracker (pun intended). Two kinematic experiments are the focus, one using a pop-up toy and one that needs fire and blades. […]
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10. Ways to teach… Electricity
Merry Christmas Physics teachers! In a bumper festive edition, Thomas and Robin have rounded up your ideas and tips on how to teach electricity. It’s quite rare to reach a clear conclusion in a discussion of teaching, but there was consensus that if you are going to use a model, then the rope model is […]
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Using The Rope Model of Electricity
In the next podcast we inevitably talk about the rope model. I tried it a few times in the past and hated it ?. It was only in making the podcast that I finally understood how to do it and how good it is. Not knowing how to do it is as much a function […]
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Somebody Out There Likes Us
Robin and I started with very limited ambitions, it wasn’t quite “more listeners than presenters” but not far off. We agreed to do episodes until the end of the academic year and then see where we stood. At that point we had not got much further than me telling Robin he and I should start […]
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9. Mentors, Motors and Merch
Robin hadn’t heard about the recent Falcon landing failure so Thomas filled him in. Cutting-edge space technology is still frontier science: we need your students to be the engineers of tomorrow! Regular listeners will know how much Matt Groening influences the podcast, and just in time fro Christmas, we have launched our first ‘merch’, setting up […]
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8. Venn Hats, Meows and a Mysterious Tube
As David Bowie once mused “Is there seismic activity on Mars?” ( I think that’s what he said…), and who are we to argue? So we kicked off discussing NASA Mars Insight Lander and then Robin confessed to group about his tendency to get on a self-righteous soapbox (see episode 7!). Luckily this week’s chat was […]