16 May 2024

Momentum


 It's easy to understand how to stack the near-frictionless @pascoscientific trollies on top of one another to increase the mass two or three times and use the magnetic bumpers to create fully elastic collisions or the Velcro to create inelastic ones.

15 May 2024

Tracing Paper


 Tracing paper, often overlooked, is one of the most vital tools for a math exam. Its versatility in helping visualize transformations, reflections, and rotations can significantly improve problem-solving efficiency. Remember to bring it! #MathExamEssentials

14 May 2024

Water Turbine


 The water turbine shows a set of energy conversions that the students are quite familiar with. Gravitational potential energy is converted to Kinetic to Electrical in the generator and from there into light. I am not so sure about the Coloured Wheel, but it is interesting and gives rise to lots of interesting Physics discussions.

13 May 2024

The Brain


 Looking at the Brain and revision, try juggling for 5 minutes between 20 revision sessions. Juggling lets some of the brain relax while working on the hand-eye coordination centre. After juggling, learning is better, and memory recall is more effective.

11 May 2024

Inside a Laptop


 A laptop hard disk upgrade gave many students their first look inside a laptop, allowing them to find and identify the parts and compare them to the desktop version. Changing to an SSD improved the boot time of the laptop, making it usable again as well as gaining an extra TB of storage.

10 May 2024

Testing for chemicals


 Putting on their detective hats, the students tried to determine the mystery chemical. A good, fun experiment, with the students discovering that a negative test was almost as good as a positive one in detective work. I just wish I had a Mass Spectrometer - even more fun.

09 May 2024

Energy Conversions


Energy conversions: the Steam Engine. Chemical energy in the fuel is turned into thermal energy and then into kinetic energy. Passing down a pully for gear reduction to change from spinning to a vertical motion and powering several different devices from one. One device: so much Physics.

“Why the Rate-Determining Step Is Not Always Obvious” A-Level Chemistry

  “Why the Rate-Determining Step Is Not Always Obvious” A student sees a three-step mechanism and immediately chooses the slowest-looking s...