Richard Taylor, retired Physics teacher, Ottawa Carleton District School Board
Richard@teya.ca

“Brrrriiinngg! Hello, Richard? I was just cutting up some candles to use in the grade 10 optics labs and I got thinking about those cute little LED things you made. Do you think you could make some more for me?”

Certainly I remembered the grade 10 optics labs! Carefully prepping all those candles and optical benches, carefully priming the students to use the candles. Turn out the classroom lights and then the chaos begins. Matches breaking, fingers and hair getting singed, wax spilled on lab benches and floors (amazingly slippery!), images too dim to be seen, and which way up is that candle flame image anyway?

Several years ago, I came up with a better idea: mounting a red and a green LED on top of a 9 V battery. The LEDs produce about the same amount of light as a candle, and having the two different colours makes it easy to see whether an image is upright or inverted. After building 15 more of these, I thought it was about time to share the instructions so that other teachers can build their own. Read More...

Tags: Electricity, Optics

The Ontario Association of Physics Teachers (OAPT) is excited to bring back the Virtual Physics Hours series due to popular demand! In addition to our spring conference, the OAPT will be hosting virtual evening PD sessions for educators to drop in, learn, and share with colleagues. Session 1 will be held on Wednesday December 7th at 7:00pm EST.

Our first session will be focused on Destreaming Grade 9 and feature a panel of incredible educators who each are experts in different areas. Andrea McPhee, Sean Jackson , Chris Meyer and Ashley McCarl Palmer will all share insights into their own current grade 9 classrooms and answer your questions.

• Andrea (@ms_mcphee) brings a wealth of knowledge, especially when it comes to bringing technology into the classroom.
• Sean (@mrjacksondotca) is a specialist in teaching tools and is an expert when it comes to choosing the right teaching strategy to engage learners.
• Chris (@ChrisMeyerSci) is well known for his thoughtful scaffolding and collaborative inquiry focused classroom.
• Ashley (@phsyicswithmcp) has done a deep dive into assessment and grading strategies, shifting the focus back on to learning.

Sign up is via this form. Given this session is not primarily physics focused, any high school science educator is welcome to join, so please pass this along to anyone who may be interested. A zoom link will be sent to those that signed up closer to the date.

We are looking forward to seeing you soon!

The OAPT Physics Hour Committee

Tags: Pedagogy

We are back! The 2023 OAPT Conference will take place May 4-6, 2023 at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo.

The search is on for presenters. Do you have an interesting lesson, a novel teaching idea, a hands-on activity or pedagogical tips that you would like to share? Please consider submitting a proposal for a presentation or a workshop that touches upon any aspect of physics teaching.

The workshops will be offered during four blocks on Friday (two in the morning and two in the afternoon) and two blocks on Saturday morning. Presenters can choose the length of session they want to present in. Please note: Presenters receive a special discounted conference rate.

We offer three formats: 15-minute presentation, 25-minute mini-workshop and 60-minute workshop.

Deadline for presentation proposals: December 10, 2022 Please submit proposals here: 
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bZIsqp0BBQqHiB3rsi4JagY9HACYg5lQmFLPxNBUVTk/edit

Questions? Contact Saara Naudts or Olga Michalopoulos (Conference Co-Chairs).

Tags: Conference

Chris Meyer, York Mills C.I., Toronto District School Board
Chris_meyer1@sympatico.ca

Pride comes before the freefall
What topic could be easier, right? It’s just straight up and down — no funny business. Freefall is the poster child of constant acceleration, everyone’s go-to example. We can teach this in our sleep! But we might not realize that we are setting up our students for a physics ambush. While our students’ first freefall problem might seem straightforward and understandable, the second one often contains a trap!

Second freefall problem: “You drop a ball from a window 1.9 m above the ground. How much time does it take to hit the ground?” The student sizes up the problem; it seems easy. The displacement is 1.9 m downward. The acceleration is known; the student is feeling confident. They can find the time if they know one more motion quantity. Ah, the final velocity is zero! Problem solved!

And thus, the unsuspecting student is ensnared in the most common trap of freefall motion. This highlights the real challenge of understanding freefall: students need a genuinely sophisticated understanding of forces to make use of freefall ideas. Emphasizing freefall before studying forces allows students to tumble into numerous, all-too-common learning traps. Let’s nimbly dodge these traps and explore a better way to study freefall! Read More...

Tags: Forces, Kinematics, Pedagogy

Randy Lewis, Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University
randy.lewis@yorku.ca

All high school physics teachers are warmly invited to York University at 5:30 PM on Friday November 11, 2022. This annual tradition has not been possible for the past two years, and professors in our Department of Physics and Astronomy are looking forward to reconnecting with high school teachers this year.

Three York professors will give short talks about their research. Tours of our telescope (which is the largest on any university campus in Canada) will be available. Dinner and drinks will be provided, and there will be opportunities for casual conversations with new colleagues and familiar friends. We also have a collection of textbooks that are no longer needed at York, and we are glad to donate these to any high school teachers who can make good use of them. Read More...

Tags: Astronomy, Modern Physics, Professional Development

Orbax, Production Specialist for Physics Education Content, Department of Physics, University of Guelph
orbax@uoguelph.ca

Greetings educators! Orbax here from the Department of Physics at the University of Guelph.

When I went to university for physics in the late 90s, “science communication” as we know it now did not exist. Our science communicators were there, but it seemed like it was much more of a journey to find them then than it is now. Television (both high-end productions and cable access), radio, print media… these were the ways in which we found science communication mostly born out of a necessity to demystify some of the more obscure elements of our profession as well as a way to combat some of the pseudoscience that was rampant in the media. Read More...

Tags: Forces, Kinematics, Magnetism, Motion, STEM

Kim Jones, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University
kjones@mcmaster.ca

It’s the question students have been asking for generations, in math classes, in science classes, and definitely in Physics classes… “Miss, when am I going to use this?” They rub their faces and pull on their hair in despair, unable to connect the laws of motion to their day-to-day dreams of the future.

Studies have shown that students are more motivated and interested when they are able to draw a straight line between their learning and its application to helping to solve real-world problems. This is especially true for girls.

When we look at the problem of girls being under-represented in engineering programs across the country, one of the pain points we can identify is that girls are more likely to opt out of grade 12 physics, a mandatory course for entry into post-secondary Engineering programs. Although there are systemic reasons for this, one of the easiest fixes is to make grade 11 physics curriculum more real-world solution focused. Read More...

Tags: Diversity, Energy, Kinematics

Chris Meyer, Past President, Ontario Association of Physics Teachers
christopher.meyer@tdsb.on.ca

The stock and trade of the science teacher is the Bohr diagram. Ask a random person off the street what an atom looks like and they will describe a Bohr diagram (well, actually something similar but with ovals — just Google “atom”). But is the Bohr diagram a useful representation of the atom to teach students? In this article we will explore the conceptual foundations of the Bohr diagram and my proposed alternatives. Along the way, we will delve into the science of the atom and flesh out some challenging ideas. Now, normally when I write an article, I share well-rehearsed practices from my classroom. This article will be different! Here I share my musings as an attempt to define this problem and layout possible solutions. I'll also let you in on a little secret of mine: when I want to learn more about something, I choose to write an article about it! Since this is an exploration, I would be very happy to hear your thoughts on these ideas. I am no chemist and I recognize that I am venturing into dangerous terrain. Read on! Read More...

Tags: Pedagogy, Quantum

Eric Haller, Editor of the OAPT Newsletter, Occasional Teacher with the Peel District School Board
eric.haller@peelsb.com

It’s the start of another school year and the OAPT is once again looking for submissions for the newsletter. The newsletter is made possible by volunteers who contribute their thoughts and ideas for others to use in their classrooms. Many of our writers are Ontario high school teachers, however some of our writers teach in university, live abroad, have retired, or have even left the teaching profession for some other career that involves physics. We have numerous writers who pen something for us regularly, but we are always on the lookout for new writers as well (writing for us looks great on a resume). With COVID precautions being relaxed and hybrid classes in the rear-view mirror for most of us, some of you may need inspiration for what to write an article about this year. Fear not, remember that we are facing the destreaming of grade 9 science, so articles pertaining to destreaming or the teaching of physics content in the new science course would be beneficial to our readership. For further inspiration, here are some other possible topics for articles: Read More...

Chris Meyer, Past President, Ontario Association of Physics Teachers
chris_meyer1@sympatico.ca

At times electrons can seem awfully clever, as if they talk to one another and plan what each will do: “okay, so you two go along that path and I'll go along this one” or “I'll only give up ¼ of my energy here because the next load has a higher resistance and I need to give it ¾ of my energy”. How do they pull off these amazing feats of collaboration and foresight? For years I was genuinely stumped when trying to explain the rationale behind series and parallel phenomena; my attempts were all variations of “well, because that’s what happens”.

How do electrons “know” that there is another resistor connected in series down the road? How do they “know” which parallel path to choose? For that matter, how does a battery connected to a single resistor “know” how much current to push? There are so many mysteries of simple electric circuits! Let's explore the last question first, which will help us answer all the others. Read More...

Tags: Electricity, Field Theory

The annual online physics contest open to ALL Grade 11 and 12 physics students will be occurring on May 25th. The contest is one hour long and is free! The contest will be open to BOTH Grade 11 AND Grade 12 students due to the generous support of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. All physics teachers are encouraged to have their students enroll. Please remind students that it is intended to be a FUN contest and that it cannot impact their mark so that they do not feel intimidated to participate. Read More...

Tags: Contest

Saara Naudts, Peel District School Board
saara.naudts@icloud.com

Inspired by Adam Mills’s recent articles on Shining Light on Grade 10 Optics (see part 1 and part 2), I wanted to extend the spotlight to linear polarization in the grade 12 The Wave Nature of Light unit. When teaching how light gets polarized when passing through a filter, we often see a rope and gate model, where a vertically oriented filter allows vertical vibrations to pass through and a horizontally oriented filter allows horizontal vibrations to pass through. Unfortunately, this model has its shortcomings. 

Over a decade ago, OAPT past-president, Roberta Tevlin introduced me to an activity during which students act out the process of polarization through a polarizing filter the right way. As an advocate for “learning by doing” and as a supporter of John Dewey’s Experiential Learning Theory (Dewey, 1938), I want to share this simple, yet effective dramatization of linear polarization. I hope you will give it a try with your students and find it to be a meaningful and effective teaching strategy. Read More...

Tags: Light, Pedagogy

Chris Meyer, Past President, Ontario Association of Physics Teachers
chris_meyer1@sympatico.ca

In my early years of teaching physics, I was often surprised by the difficulties my grade 12 students (actually OAC students at the time!) had with forces. Many times, the sneaky culprit responsible for their troubles was the first law of motion. “Why are they having trouble with such simple grade 11 ideas?” I puzzled, “these are good students”. I have been wrestling with this question for 23 years and now have a better understanding of what I'm trying to accomplish as a teacher and what is happening inside my students’ heads. Let’s explore a better way to train students to think about forces. Read More...

Tags: Forces, Pedagogy

Orbax, Production Specialist for Physics Education Content, Department of Physics, University of Guelph
orbax@uoguelph.ca

Greetings everyone! Orbax here. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been a member of the Department of Physics at the University of Guelph as an instructor for over 13 years now, and most recently as a production specialist in physics education content. Just like you, I love physics and I love teaching physics. I remember when I was young laying in my parents’ bed and poring through a book my father had from his university class on astronomy. I had very little understanding of what I was looking at in those pictures but I knew that the fantastic images in front of me showed a universe that laid just beyond the clouds, one that captured my imagination and that sent me down a path to becoming a physicist.

Since then my career has taken me to many places but I have never lost the fascination I’ve always held for outer space. I feel there are few things more galvanizing to scientists and interesting to the population as a whole than space exploration. As such, I’ve started a video series of monthly ‘Star Gazing Guides’. Very much in the tradition of the old Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer series (does anyone else remember those?), we take a look around the night sky for upcoming events of interest. The videos are very much aimed at the general population with little or no astronomy experience, but as a physics teacher, I try to use a portion of the video to slyly backdoor some actual physics education content. We talk about wavelengths of light, rotational axes, basic planetary interactions, and try to explain things like the solstice or an eclipse. Read More...

Tags: Astronomy, Cosmology, STEAM, STEM, Technology

Robert Prior, ePublisher OAPT Newsletter
science@robertprior.ca

There’s a lot of good physics (and math) embedded in the grade nine space unit, if you know where to look for it. David Butler is a retired computer scientist who is fascinated with space, and he’s applied his mathematical background to explaining, in simple terms, what’s behind the fancy pictures we see from NASA, and how we know what we know about the universe. To do this he’s created a series of video books focusing on different topics, as well as hundreds of short classroom-ready video clips on topics ranging from astronomy to quantum mechanics. Read More...

Tags: Astronomy, Cosmology, Diversity, History, Math, Modern Physics, Quantum

Chris Meyer
Past-President, OAPT
Chris_meyer1@sympatico.ca

Are you looking for exciting tasks for your students now that we have made the sudden switch to virtual teaching? You have come to the right place! A staple of our grade 12 physics classes is our physics challenges: cooperative-group problem-solving tasks that involve a physical apparatus, measurements, a prediction, and an experimental confirmation. One of my COVID projects has been making careful videos of these challenges that allow students to understand the problem and make measurements directly from the video. A separate solution video allows students to experimentally verify their predictions. Normally, I would write a long-winded, exhaustive article about the pedagogical design of the challenge process, but not this time! Instead, this will be a quick article so I can share these with you as quickly as possible! Looking for an engaging and rich task to wrap up your physics course with? Read on! Read More...

Tags: Assessment, Astronomy, Electricity, Energy, Momentum, Optics, Pedagogy, Remote Learning

Eric Haller, Editor-in-Chief of the OAPT Newsletter, Secondary Long Term Occasional Teacher with the Peel District School Board
eric.haller@peelsb.com

With the switch to online and hybrid learning, we have had to migrate much of what we do in class to an online environment for the students working from home. Many boards have opted to use Brightspace for their virtual learning environments, and that’s what I use to post my announcements, synchronous meeting links, lesson notes, calendars, grades, assignments, rubrics, and so on. Students can find and submit their assignments to me using the Assignments tab. The Rubric tool allows me to create and share rubrics with my classes, making marking, exporting marks to the Grades section, and returning feedback, all extremely quick and easy. Brightspace streamlines this so well that I no longer accept hardcopy or emailed submissions. In conversations with my coworkers about the features in Brightspace that we use, I was surprised to learn that many of my peers were not comfortable using Brightspace to give tests. I still regularly see my colleagues administer pen-and-paper tests in their hybrid classes. Students attending school in-person write the test in the traditional way, and students at home typically print out a .pdf of the test, write on it in pencil, and scan and send it back to the teacher. Tech savvy students might just write directly onto the .pdf using a tablet instead. While this method works for many teachers, I find that it creates numerous problems. Since we can’t really proctor students writing the test online, they can use their notes, the internet, and even call their friends for help without our knowledge. They can even take extra time and email their responses in late, claiming their Wi-Fi is slow or using some other excuse. Students who write the test in-person will be at a significant disadvantage compared to their online counterparts, and so some will decide to stay home on test days to write the test online, which creates attendance issues. Furthermore, marking both hard and soft copy tests can take a lot of extra time compared to just marking one type of test. To avoid these problems, I have students write my tests in Brightspace by using the Quizzes tool. Read More...

Tags: Assessment, Remote Learning