January 22, 2014 at 10:21 pm
As the Olympics are starting, a friend pointed out this great web-site. http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/winterolympics/ Speaking of the Olympics, I just spent some time tonight organizing the New England Physics Olympiad. So if your school is interested, we will soon have information on a date and a location for this annual event. This year we are planning […]
January 10, 2014 at 10:51 pm
So it has been a busy week in the lab. After cleaning up after our VEX Tournament on Sunday, the students have been busy building our FRC robot! They have been busy prototyping a few different ideas. You can read the updates here. One of our alums, who was a freshman when during the first […]
December 28, 2013 at 11:51 am
The end of the semester was busy hosting a FIRST LEGO League tournament but things are finally now back up to speed. We finished the semester studying projectiles and satellites. One famous physics demonstration in the study of projectiles is the Hunter Monkey demonstration. Stav produced a great slo-mo video of this demonstration I wanted […]
October 27, 2013 at 9:53 am
This past week we started to study momentum, and how to give an object momentum by exerting a force over a period of time, or an impulse. One demonstration the students enjoyed was throwing eggs at a sheet. Here we can see the students throwing an egg at a sheet, yet it is not breaking! […]
October 22, 2013 at 12:33 am
Last week we finished our studies of Newton’s Laws and started to explore motion in two dimensions. In order to explore the ideas of Action-Reaction we had robots perform a tug-of-war. The question is, when is the tension greater. When a robot pulls on a rope tied to the wall, or when two robots pull […]
October 8, 2013 at 8:26 pm
Today we started class by discussing the Higgs Boson, which is particularly relevant since we are talking about Newton’s Second Law. Perhaps someday, we will call it Newton’s Model of Dynamics instead of Newton’s Law. The American Association of Physics Teachers came out with a resource guide of articles on the Higgs Boson. This is […]
October 7, 2013 at 10:22 pm
As teachers we often engage in professional development. As my son Leonardo often asks, why do I need to go back to school. What grade am I in? Grade 100? I went down to Cambridge to a program run by Blossoms. Blossoms is trying to integrate video into the classroom. Not in that 1980s way […]
October 7, 2013 at 10:04 pm
The students just finished writing lab reports on Galileo and inertia. They worked hard this weekend exploring the ideas of why do all objects in free fall accelerate uniformly towards the Earth no matter what the mass. The short explanation is that as weight, or the force of gravity of an object increases, the inertia […]
October 1, 2013 at 10:31 pm
I am sure it won’t last. But in some obscure category on Amazon, I am #1 on their selling list. And granted, my overall sales rank is down below 14,000, I am doing pretty well in a few categories.
October 1, 2013 at 10:52 am
Great article last week on Phys.org about the Lycurgus Cup. This is a personal story that reminds me of my wife’s wedding ring. The Romans knew to spike the glass with a few hundred parts million of silver and gold in order to create a dichronic effect. “The goblet was created approximately 1,600 years ago, […]
