Here’s a bit more on the NCEA Physics assessments that I heard about at the NZ Institute of Physics Conference last week. I alluded to it very briefly in a previous post. This comes from my notes of the presentation given by David Lillis, a statistician at the NZ Qualifications Authority. Unsurprisingly, NZQA throw lots […]
Continue readingMonth: October 2011
The continuity equation
Yesterday, being a warm, sunny Labour Day holiday (those words don’t usually go together) we decided we needed to get out of the house and go somewhere interesting, and chose the Waitomo area. Didn’t go into the show caves this time (done those a few times before) but chose to keep the bank account under […]
Continue readingOld and new
Can’t resist telling you this… Tuesday, after the conference sessions had finished and before the conference dinner, I travelled with my students by train from Wellington to Lower Hutt, to do a lightning visit to a couple of labs at Industrial Research Ltd. It was a very informative visit – I need to spend a […]
Continue readingOpposite charges repel, don’t they?
Well, the answer to that is, um… well…. it depends…. Now, I’m not suggesting what you’ve learned at school is not true. Take a point charge (e.g. a proton), and bring it close to another point charge (e.g. another proton) and the two will repel, with an inverse square law (Let’s not take them close […]
Continue readingThe varied world of physics
It was a very interesting day at the NZ Institute of Physics conference. I learned about some of the physics experiments done at the South Pole, how to trap, observe and count atoms (and that high school physics teachers who tell their students that you can’t see atoms need to update their knowledge), some results […]
Continue readingWhose fault is bad science understanding?
I’ve been forwarded the following from one of our teaching development staff – it’s a transcript of a very recent lecture by Prof Ian Chubb, Australia’s Chief Scientist. http://www.universityworldnews.com/filemgmt_data/files/Ian%20Chubb-%20NTEU%20Address%206%20October%202011.pdf In the lecture, Prof Chubb comments on the lack of science understanding in the country as a whole and how this leads to the country being […]
Continue readingMisleading reflections
For some reason I have yet to discover, the flagpole at The University of Waikato on Monday was flying the flag of the Republic of Ireland, at half-mast. However, observing this for the first time from the Faculty of Science and Engineering tearoom on Monday morning, it was hard to be sure just which flag […]
Continue readingHow to win a Nobel Prize in Physics
Well, if I knew that I would be busy doing it. Perhaps you’d be better off asking Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess who have just won the 2011 prize for their discovery of the ever accelerating expansion of the universe. I love the story I’ve heard (whether it is true or not I don’t know) that, […]
Continue readingGetting students to do your work for you
Probably every teacher’s dream is to do nothing and still have your class engaged with learning. I experienced that at the Scholarship Physics session I ran on Saturday. I was doing an exercise with the students to help them to present physics answers clearly. Every physics teacher probably knows what I mean here – often, […]
Continue readingStudent opinion counts
On Saturday I ran a session for final year school students who are soon to take the Scholarship Physics exam. There were just over fifty of them, and they were a lively group. I thought that overall the day (well, half-day really) went pretty well, and we managed to cover more than what I’ve done […]
Continue reading