Chris Meyer, Past President, OAPT
christopher.meyer@tdsb.on.ca

In the fall semester of 2024, I taught grade 11 physics for the first time in many years. I was surprised by my students - surprised by their weak math skills and the disconnect between their learning habits and mark expectations. These students were noticeably different from my students of the past. Was this a lingering pandemic hangover or part of a gradual change that I only noticed because of my absence from physics teaching? Whatever the reason, I was caught off guard and not able to adjust. So this semester, I decided to make some changes to meet this challenge and help my students better develop their learning habits and physics skills. Read More...

Tags: Forces, Motion, Pedagogy

John Donohue, IQC Senior Manager, Scientific Outreach
jdonohue@uwaterloo.ca

We’re excited to announce the 11th Quantum for Educators (QEd) workshop, which will be held July 16-18 on-campus at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo. This workshop, formerly known as Schrödinger’s Class, focuses on accessible, affordable, and appropriate ways to introduce quantum mechanics and quantum technology to high-school students.



QEd Participants will leave with ready-to-use activities and concrete curriculum connections to celebrate the 2025 UNESCO International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. QEd explores fundamental concepts like superposition, wave-particle duality, and entanglement as well as applications in existing technology like atomic clocks and emerging technologies like quantum computing. Read More...

Tags: Modern Physics, Professional Development, Quantum

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

The generative artificial intelligence ChatGPT was released upon the world back in November of 2022. This Newsletter published an article from Robert Prior on his first impressions of it shortly thereafter in January of 2023. Now that our society is over the initial shock of AI, and more and more companies have had the chance to release and further develop their own competing chatbots (like Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and China’s DeepSeek), I thought it would be a good time to revisit the topic. In this article, I will be looking at how generative AI has improved, and I will provide some thoughts on how it has impacted my students, myself as a teacher, and even some of my coworkers.

In the previously mentioned article on first impressions, we saw how ChatGPT performed when solving various physics problems. I thought the best physics question from that article was the following:

A ball travelling 1.2 m/s rolls off a table and hits the ground 0.75 m away. How high is the table? Read More...

Tags: Assessment, History, Pedagogy, Remote Learning

James Ball, University of Guelph Sessional Lecturer
jball10@uoguelph.ca



In the winter of 1977 at the AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) conference in Chicago, Ernie McFarland (then a faculty member at the University of Guelph) had a chance meeting with Scarborough high school teacher George Kelly. Both felt that it shouldn’t be necessary for Ontario’s physics teachers to travel to the United States to become better teachers. As a result of Ernie and George’s efforts, the OAPT (then known as AAPT-Ontario) became an official section of the AAPT in 1979 with Ernie as it’s first president. If you are interested in the history of the OAPT you can find an article, not surprisingly written by Ernie, here.
Read More...

Tags: History, Pedagogy

Dr. Carolyn Sealfon, Minerva University
csealfon@metalearning.ca

Wellness and mindfulness act as buzzwords these days, often seen as separate from physics. Yet we know they are important, and everything is related to physics! In this article, we will consider a few simple classroom activities that can both help students internalize the basic physics of forces and motion and also help facilitate well-being in our classes.

As Brookes, Etkina, and Planinšič argue, it is helpful to clarify our intentions as physics instructors and to align our instruction with our intentions. One valuable intentionality they propose is, “The way in which students learn physics should enhance their well being.” This intentionality underlies the renowned Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach to teaching high-school and first-year university physics (Brookes et al., 2020).

As physics instructors, one way we can integrate well-being and physics is through inviting students to feel the physics that they are learning in their bodies. When we are asked, “What do you teach?” we usually respond, “physics,” when really the answer is “human beings”. Very often, especially in physics, we and our students can get “stuck in our heads” and almost forget we are whole human beings.


Image from "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham, www.phdcomics.com, used with permission. Read More...

Tags: Forces, Motion, Pedagogy