1. Dick Gunstone to talk with Students: Discussion of Motion with interactive tasks. 4:00pm, 13th June, online
In this term's first newsletter, there was an item about VCE Revision and Monash University's Virtual School.(MVS).
The Virtual School is offering a series of free online experiences and revision classes for Year 11 and 12 VCE students studying the VCE Science and Maths subjects including Physics
Revision classes are usually delivered by Monash pre-service teachers under the guidance of experienced and qualified educators at Monash Education.
The focus of this initiative is to support young women’s learning and engagement in STEM by providing them with opportunities to engage with outstanding female educators who develop and deliver STEM programs in the Monash Virtual School. That being said, students of all genders are welcome to participate.
Students can register at this website.
Emeritus Professor Dick Gunstone will be hosting a special Physics session titled 'A Conceptual Exploration of Physics' on Thursday, 13th June at 4:00pm.
The focus is on discussion of Newton's laws and Galileo's ideas, without mathematical equations, as well as interactive physics tasks designed to provoke thought and encourage students to share their opinions.
For any new Physics students who register with MVS from now until the day of the session, they will automatically send them an invitation to this event and include them in all future Physics sessions as they are scheduled..
Check here for the email about the event which has more detail about Dick Gunstone's program.
2. Seeking your Audit experiences
About 25% of schools were audited this year, because it is the first year of the revised study design for Units 3 and 4. Vicphysics would like to hear about your experience of the process.
Here is a short google form where you can make comments anonymously. We are interested to hear:
- whether the audit process was manageable for you, and
- how useful was the feedback from VCAA's audit panel of each of your assessment tasks,
3. Participation in VCE Physics: Some figures and Grade Distribution for 2023 exam
VCAA has released the 2023 statistical information on Enrolments and Satisfactory Completion numbers for Units 1 to 4 . The graph below shows the trend in the participation in physics expressed as a percentage of the age cohort. This measure removes any variation due to the birth rate and the retention rate to Year 12.
In the last three years there has been a steady fall, mainly with male students. Chemistry numbers and female numbers for Biology have had similar falls. Specialist Maths continues a slow decline from 2014.
Other graphs of interest are i) the percentage of students doing Unit 2 Physics who continue on with Unit 3 the following year and ii) the percentage of Year 10 students who do Unit 1 Physics the following year. These graphs have higher values than those for Chemistry, except for the percentage of Year 10 girls choosing Unit 1 Chemistry which is about 19% compared to Physics 6%.
These graphs and those of other VCE Sciences and Maths subjects are attached. Discussion on the data up to 2022 can be found on the Vicphysics website here.
VCAA has also released the grade distributions for last year's exams. They can be accessed here.
Looking at the Physics Grade Distributions for last year, the mean score was 153.5 out of 260 (based on double marking), This figure of 59% is quite high. Previous means averaged 56%.
The A+ cutoff was 235/260 and for A it was 218/260.
These data values have been added to an historical spreadsheet of the grade distributions for each year back to 1999. This file can be accessed here. It is in the Teachers section for subscribers under 'Revision and Exams'..
4. Cow Magnets and risks with neodymium magnets
It is well known that cows will eat almost anything while grazing, from grass, dirt, nails and screws, through to pieces of bailing wire and even barbed wire.
Cow magnets are very popular with dairy farmers and veterinarians in an effort to help prevent 'Hardware Disease' in cattle. These metal contaminants tend to lodge in the honeycombed walls of the cow's reticulum (stomach), threatening surrounding organs and causing irritation and inflammation known as Hardware Disease. Cows suffering from hardware disease generally experience a loss of appetite and a corresponding inability to gain weight. Most magnet suppliers stock cow magnets, they range in price, with several selling them for around $10 each.
A related story: Neodymium magnets: It is advisable that students should not be given neodymium magnets. Swallowing one isn't a problem, but swallowing two requires immediate surgical intervention, check medical advice here .
5. BBC podcast series on 'The Bomb'
The
series delves into the wider story of the atomic bomb, beyond the film 'Oppenheimer'. It is told through 'the scientists and spies who changed history'. Season 1 focuses on Leo Szilard from when he proposed the possibility of a chain reaction to his attempts to stop the bomb being used. Season 2 focuses on Klaus Fuchs. There is a Season 3 is coming soon. Each episode is about 20 mins.
6. Events for Students
Girls in Physics Breakfast for 2024
Bookings are open and flyers are available.
- Bendigo, 1st August. Speaker: Dr Nadia Zatsepin, La Trobe University, Topic: Making molecular movies with X-ray lasers.
- Geelong, 15th August. Speakers: Prof Bre-Anne Sainsbury, Prof Wendy Timms, Deakin University, Topics: a) The Gentle Art of Breaking Stuff, b) Locking Carbon in the Ground: How, When, Where?
The cost this year is $25 per student inc GST with the first teacher free. A discount is available.
Please check the website for more details. Bookings can now be made for the ones with confirmed dates. The others will open for bookings as venue and speaker details are confirmed.
Return to top
7. Events for Teachers
Out-of-Field PD for Science Teachers: Forces and Motion (Leongatha) in-person
Forces and Motion will be at Leongatha on 12th and 19th June. The cost is $220 and there is CRT coverage for Government schools.
Check here for details for this event.
Material is being developed for PD on Light and Sound, and Energy which are expected to be conducted in the 2nd half of the year.
8. Seeking a Physics teacher? Seeking a new position?
There are five schools seeking a physics teacher.
The webpage is updated every weekend. The webpage also has a link on how schools can register a position and lodge a payment for this service.
- Kyabram P-12 College (closes 5th June)
- Fairhills High School (closes 10th June)
- Sale College (closes 3rd June)
- Stawell Secondary College (closes 13th June
- Mount Alexander 7 - 12 College (closes 2nd June)
i) Vicphysics Forum: Tips and Questions for the Physics Teaching Community
The Vicphysics Teachers’ Network has set up an online Forum for teachers to raise issues, seek ideas, offer suggestions, etc. The link is on the top line of our website’s home page: https://www.vicphysics.org/ We hope it will be an opportunity for mutual professional development.
The forum is open to all teachers. If you are a subscriber you can login in the usual way. If you are not a subscriber you can register to just use the forum at ‘My Account’. Given the purposes of this Forum, we ask that you use your real name when generating a topic or a lodging a post.
We hope this Forum will become a valuable medium for the exchange of ideas as we begin planning for the new study design.
ii) Subscriptions: A Vicphysics subscription gives you access to the Teachers section of the website. The subscription will last for a year from the day payment is received. Both individual and school subscriptions are available. Check the homepage for subscription link.
Return to top
10. Physics News from the Web
Items selected from the bulletin of the Institute of Physics (UK).
Each item below includes the introductory paragraphs and a web link to the rest of the article.
a) Ursula Le Guin: the pioneering author we should thank for popularising Schrödinger’s cat
Despite its current ubiquity, the fictitious animal only really entered wider public consciousness after the US science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin published a short story called “Schrödinger’s cat” exactly 50 years ago. Le Guin, who died in 2018 at the age of 88, was a widely admired writer, who produced more than 20 novels and over 100 short stories.
Schrödinger originally invented the cat image as a gag. If true believers in quantum mechanics are right that the microworld’s uncertainties are dispelled only when we observe it, Schrödinger felt, this must also sometimes happen in the macroworld – and that’s ridiculous. Writing in a paper published in 1935 in the German-language journal Naturwissenschaften (23 807), he presented his famous cat-in-a-box image to show why such a notion is foolish.
b) Decimal time: life in a world where our days are divided differently
A review of the novel The Clockwork Conspiracy by Sam Sedgman.
In an era where conspiracy theories run amok, this fictional thriller invites more than just the curiosity of its adolescent target audience. The Clockwork Conspiracy is a story about the potential impact of a new law to decimalise time in the UK. According to Miriam – one of the MPs in the novel – the law will “simplify the way we measure things [and] make the UK a leader in scientific research”.
The plan sounds innocuous enough: a day will be divided into 10 hours, each of 100 minutes, with each minute being 100 seconds. The proposed new law is not entirely in the realms of fiction – after all, decimal time was the legal standard in France during the French Revolution.
c) Bruno Touschek: the physicist who escaped the Nazi Holocaust to build particle colliders
Bruno Touschek was an Austrian-born theoretical physicist who proposed what became the world’s first circular particle collider. But few of his colleagues were aware of his dramatic past.
Return to top
