Using Lego to Teach - Basic Levers

The basic Lego lever. A few brick and a pivot is all that is required. The pivot needs to allow the bar to more freely.

A homemade lego weight using a lego rock filled with 1p's. This gives enough weight (load) to be noticed using a finger as the effort.









 A first class lever. Press on the yellow flat brick.










A second class lever such as a wheel barrow. It is necessary to lift under the flat yellow plate.










A third class lever such a fishing rod or tweezers for a pair of third class levers. It is again necessary to lift under the yellow plate.

Using Lego to teach - Lever Arm Balance

Lego can often be used to create many instruments that are expensive to buy or who will be used so little that the cost cannot really be justified. That's where creating an object like this Lever Arm balance - that really works is well worth it.

Lego do make one of these in one of their educational sets, but I just made mine from a collection of Lego that I had.

The lever is an example of a first class lever. The car wheel is used as the counterbalance. The balance can accurately weigh up to about 200g in this configuration. If another wheel is used then far more. In the 0-200g range the balance is accurate and quite sturdy. The scale was made from a piece of paper and calibrated using a series of known weights.

Good books for science GCSE

 I am often asked which books I recommend for GCSE Science. These books are very visual but have a large amount of content. These books are written for all syllabuses ( AQA, Edexcel and OCR) and thus cover all the different GCSE's in three books. These books are for Single, double and triple science. They also cover most of the material for the 21st Century syllabus as well.
Each Chapter is well laid out with images and a good deal of well displayed facts. There is also a substantial amount of text as an explanation. This is much better than some of the normal students books which do not give enough material. These books provide some background material which is otherwise

missing from their school books.
At the end of each chapter there is a summary with some missing word to complete and some questions. At the end of each topic there are some past  paper questions and others from all boards.
These represent good books at a good price to cover all the different boards syllabus.
Each book has plenty of images both pictures and graphics to show or explain each different situation.
Hemel Private Tuition

Private Tutoring Boosts grades

If you want to improve your grades then a Private Tutor seems a good idea. An hour with a private tutor and your grades shoot up from a U to and A*.

Unfortunately this is not the case.

The tutor may know the yllabus and the work and may be able to explain it differently to you than your teacher did, which will help you to understand what you didn't learn in class.. The tutor has only you and you to full concentration. Your grade might go up a bit, but to go up more then you need to do some work as well.

You now have a better understanding of the subject but now you need to learn this work.

How do you learn this stuff.

1. Make notes of what the tutor says. The tutor may make notes but you also need some.
2. Read through these notes a few times.
3. Read the notes again another day.
4. Do some practice questions.
5. Get these questions marked with someone telling you waht you did wrong.
6. On another day do these questions again just after you have re-read your notes.
7. Try some more questions.

With a Private Tutor for a few weeks and doing all of the above, you grades will soar.

The Learning still has to be done, but guided learning makes things easier.

EM Spectra

What is Light? How are the other EM Spectra different?

They are not is the simple answer. From Gamma rays to radio waves the EM spectra is just the same, its only that we perceive them differently and need different ways of detecting the waves.

Lets look at an example.
We see light in all its different colours. Each different colour is a different wavelength. Lets look at Infra red. if I shine an infra red beam at you, you don't see it simply because your eyes don't detect infrared radiation. If I direct a camera (that has a wider capture range than your eye) at an infrared beam then I can "see" it - simply because the camera detects the light and changes its wavelength into something you can see.
You Tube video of a looking a Sky remote

So know you can see IR light then UV is the same. Moving further along the spectrum then we need different types of detectors to detect the radiation. Our hands work well as detectors on the lower end of the infrared and for more frequencies we need more and different detectors.

The detectors change but the nature of the waves does not change.

How to Learn Multiplication Tables

If you ask most students what is is their real problem with Maths, they usually own up to not knowing their times tables. It doesn't really matter the students age or level (Some A level students don't know their tables.)

Now is the best time to learn those tables.

How do I learn the multiplication tables.
There are some wonderful mobile apps that help, but there is really no other choice than learning all the tables from scratch.

Learn your tables in a week.

Stage 1
Chose 1 table to learn
Write out the table

1 x 4 = 4
2 x 4 = 8
3 x 4 = 12

and so on...

Stage 2
Write this table out 5 times
This is getting boring - can you write out the table without looking

Stage 3
Write out the table without looking (and without counting on)

Sucess then Stage 4 otherwise repeat Stage 2

Stage 4
Now here you need someone to help
Get them to ask each of the lines at random
They say for example 4 x 5 =
And you say 20 withing 2 seconds

Stage 5
If you have learnt anther table then have a mixture of those you have learnt.
Continue until you know them all.

Stage 6
Revise daily for a few weeks.

Revising for Maths

Many subjects can be revised by learning the facts as outlined in the previous post.

Maths revision is different.

It doesn't work that way. For A level and GCSE there are certainly some formulae that have to be learnt because they are not on the formula sheet, but for most maths there is only one way.

Do some examples.

Here is a simple plan to Help.

For this you need a Maths book and not necessarily the one you use at school.

Stage 1
Choose a Topic

Stage 2
Read through the example questions and samples. If you can't remember them then do the examples on a sheet of paper. Looking at how it is done.

Stage 3
Do an example - write down the question, close the book and then answer the question

Stage 4
Do all the odd number question in an exercise

Stage 5
Now you understand how to do the questions
And this is the important bit
Each day do one or two of the even numbered questions from the exercise each day.
Now you know how to do the sum, doing one or two each day keeps them fresh in your mind.

Stage 6
Repeat Stage 1-5
Each day you learn ( ok revise) a new topic and each day you practice one or two questions from each of the other topics you have revised.