1. An Approach to Teaching Energy: The Bumper Book of Energy.
The UK Curriculum uses a different 'energy paradigm' from the 'forms of energy' approach.  It has two concepts:

• Energy stores e.g. chemical, kinetic, thermal, elastic, etc
• Energy pathways e.g forces, current, radiation, etc.

There is a 45 page resource titled 'The Bumper Book of Energy', see links below.  It is for Key Stages 3 and 4 which is equivalent to our Years 7 to 11.  Features include:

• Descriptions of the various pathways,
• Student progress in describing energy stores from simple descriptions to calculation of change,
• Student progress in describing energy pathways from simple statements to detailed scientific models,
• Rubrics for student explanations of different pathways from pre-structural to uni-structural to multi-structural to relational to extended abstract,
• There are also teaching ideas and some worksheets.

The book is available from two sources, i) as a google doc in which the equations and some graphics don't seem to appear and ii) as a download from this website in which a small section of text is missing, 
Also check out: 

• BEST: Best Evidence Science Teaching from the Science Education Group at the University of York.
• The Science Doctor :  Secondary physics worksheets and science teaching resources by a UK Physics teacher who 'wants science/physics teachers to have free access to quality resources'.  His site currently includes: 9 GCSE physics booklets, 13 A level booklets and 400 downloadable physics resources. He has a 'buymeacoffee' button, but would prefer donations go to a neonatal clinic in Watford.
• 'E=mc2and all that'-   A UK physics teacher writes about stuff.  He has themed collections on electric circuit models, Magnetism, Lenz's Law, Energy, Newton's Laws and Marking 'What to do if your school has a batshit crazy marking policy'. The teaching suggestions are clear and direct, and supported by animations.

3.  Physics in Advent: Short practical activities for home
Physics in Advent has hundreds of short practical activities that can be done with things around the house.  The activities can be used to introduce a concept at any level from upper primary to senior secondary, improve students' practical skills or even suggest investigations.  They cover a wide range of everyday physics. Some examples include:

• Drop a table tennis ball and note the rebound height. Take a paper cup, one-third fill it with water and put the ball in the cup.  Now drop the cup.  What happens to the ball?
• Cut 2 - 3 m of string.  Attach one end to a solid object.  Now make a small loop in the string near the object, then further along a large loop, then a small loop and finally a medium sized loop.  Now gently pull on the string, which string loops close first?
• Use an inclined plane and two glasses. Warm one glass with hot water, discard the water, then dry the glass. Place both glasses upside down at the top of the inclined plane and release. What happens?
• Try four different techniques (described) to empty a bottle of water. Which is quickest? 

It is an initiative of Georg-August Universitat in Gottingen, a competition for students.  Each Christmas, on each day of December until Xmas Day, they release a short video (2 min) introducing a practical activity, like the ones above, each with four possible outcomes.  The students have 24 hours to do the activity and register the outcome online, before a video of the full activity with the answer is uploaded and the activity for the next day is also uploaded.  After Xmas, prizes are awarded.

The program has been running since 2013, so there are over 200 activities.  The website has an archive for previous years.  For each day the website displays the introductory video, the answer video and the four possible outcomes. The intro video also has a Youtube link which you can give to your students without them needing to access the website and see the answer video.  Note: The videos have a Santa theme and start with several seconds of examples of domino toppling.
When you open the website, scan left across the images until you see a slide with dates 1 to 24. Click on this to open the page and then select one of the dates.

To assist you with finding suitable activities for a topic, Vicphysics has prepared a spreadsheet of the activities with:

• worksheets for many of the years, each with 24 rows, one for each day, with the physics topic and a description of the task and the four possible outcomes,
• another worksheet with a list of the physics topics covered and the year and date of activities for each topic.

This information is also on the Vicphysics website under Investigations and Practical Activities.  Not all the years have been processed yet, but will be in coming weeks.  Some of the activities use the Phyphox app.

Youtube videos of activities at the top: Ball,  String, Glasses, Water  The answers will be in the next newsletter.
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  4. Golf Impacts: Opportunity for problems, assessment tasks and investigations
The impact of a club head with a golf ball allows many physics concepts to be used.  Apart from the obvious momentum and kinetic energy aspects of the collision, the impact time enables the dynamics of the collision to be explored.  From the impact time the average force by each object on the other can be calculated, either from the change in an object's momentum or its acceleration.  With the impact time the distances travelled by the clubhead and the ball during the impact can each be determined as well as the work done by each object, which links to the energy loss.
There are two experimental difficulties i) Measuring the speeds of the clubhead and the ball, ii) measuring the impact time.  But there are solutions available. 
Measuring speeds: High speed video from the side is very expensive ($10,000+), but doppler units that measure from the back and at ground level are about $800 and are available for use at many golf clubs.  See sample data below.
Impact time: While electronic timers could measure the impact time, wiring up the equipment presents challenges. The golfing industry has a solution at hand.  There are standards for the design of golf balls and clubheads, in particular, drivers.  One measure for golf balls is the Coefficient of Restitution (COR), which for a collision is the ratio of the speed of separation to the speed of approach.  For golf balls this can be measured by dropping them on concrete.   For drivers, the measure is the Characteristic Time (CT), which is the impact time measured in microseconds.  Research by the USGA has found a linear relationship between the two measures. Check here. CT (in microseconds) = 2260 x COR - 1620
So if a student measures the COR of their golf ball, and they use a driver, they can collect enough data to fully analyse the impact.

Golf Launch Monitors:

• Rapsodo,  iPhone app for US$433 from Amazon
• Garmin R10: $1000
• TopTracer is at the following golf courses: Yarra Bend, Swing Factory Morack, Plenty Views, Sandringham Links, Curlewis in Geelong and Sunraysia Golf Range at Mildura.
• Trackman: Latrobe golf park in Bundoora, Golf TEC in CBD

The Garmin provides data of the following quantities with indicated uncertainties: Clubhead speed (+/- 4.8 kph), Club face angle (+/-2 deg), Club path angle (+/- 4 deg), Angle of attack (+/- 3 deg), Ball speed (+/- 1.6 kph), Launch angle (+/- 1 deg), Launch direction (+/- 1 deg), Spin axis, Spin rate, Apex height accuracy (+/- 5 ft), Smash factor, Carry distance (+/- 5 yds), Total Distance and Deviation distance. as well as temperature and humidity.  Link to sample data.
5. Classic PSSC Physics Films on Youtube
The PSSC course from the 1960's was well resourced with experiments and AV material. The course was accompanied by 53 films.  Most of them are now available on Youtube and in archives.  This Reddit post has the links.  While dated, in B&W and old fashioned, some still have an educational value, particularly ones such as Frames of Reference and Universal Gravitation. 6. New Video on Veritasium: Do People understand the Scale of the Universe?
Derek Muller has released another video (15 min). This is another of his engaging vox-pop interviews in which he asks people in the street to rank the words: planet, star, moon, universe and galaxy in order of size. His approach is engaging and brings out misconceptions.  It includes some useful comparisons like the number of trees on earth.  It would be a useful resource for middle school science. 7. Sources of physics problems
This US Physics website, Physics Lab, was established in 1997 by physics teacher, Catherine Colwell.  It contains links to questions produced since then, from several sources such as AAPT, PhysicsBowl exams, Problems from Paul Hewitt's Conceptual Physics, etc.  Nearly all these questions are multiple choice, but there is a section called 'Free Response Questions' which we would call short answer questions.
The questions are designed for students to do online and check their answers.  The questions are not in a downloadable form, but they can be copied and pasted.
Catherine retired in 2018 but maintains the website and updates it each year.
The website also contains her Resource lessons (180), Worksheets (350) and Prac sheets (100's). 8. Kathy Loves Physics: Videos
Kathy Joseph is a retired US physics teacher and historian who has produced a collection of physics historical and contextual videos.  They will be on interest to teachers, rather than students, the delivery is dry, but the historical research is thorough.
Quote from a review: 'These stories put physics into context by teaching about the often fascinating, wild, and raucous events underpinning physics discoveries, and help paint the originators of our science as real people with their own flaws and foibles. Learning the politics of the day and of science helps put physics into context, as do the other societal, artistic, and literary events of the day when physicists lived and developed the standard canon we study and teach today'.

There are 115 Youtube videos also grouped in 14 playlists.  Topics and people covered include astronomy, spectroscopy, modern physics, lightning, quantum physics, radio and wireless, thermodynamics, Max Planck, Michael Faraday, Niels Bohr, Ohm, Wheatstone, Joule, Fraunhofer, Davy, the telegraph, batteries, X-rays, and the photoelectric effect.  They range for 5 to 25 minute videos, some with references and manuscripts available online.
9. Events for Students

Physics Days at Luna Park in 2024
The dates for 2024 are Monday 4th March to Friday 8th March.
Luna Park has opened its bookings.  The student fee will be $31.50 and a deposit of 30% is required to confirm the booking.
Aerobatic displays have been requested, but confirmation is not received until February.
The worksheets have not been updated since they were first written in 2004.  The terminology for forces has changed and there have been some content changes, so the worksheets are being updated and will be available in two weeks.

b) Girls in Physics Breakfast for 2024
Organsing the Breakfasts program with 2024 is well underway.  Below are the events planned so far:

• Ballarat, 8th March. Speaker Prof Emma Ryan-Weber, Swinburne University
• Mildura, TBC. Speaker: TBC
• Monash University, 22nd March. Speaker: A/Prof Kaye Morgan, Monash University
• Traralgon, 17th May, Speaker: Natalie Clements, Medical radiation physicist
• Central Melbourne, 9th May (TBC).  AIP Women in Physics Lecturer for 2024
• Wodonga, 30th May (TBC),  Speaker Dr Renee Goreham, University of Newscastle
• Bendigo, (TBC).  Speaker: Dr Nadia Zatsepin, La Trobe University
• Geelong, (TBC).  Speaker: TBC.

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. 10. Events for Teachers 

a) PHYSCON 2024: 23rd February, 2024. Registration is open

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13.   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) Solar-powered fabric cools in the day and warms at night
Researchers in China have unveiled a new concept for solar-powered clothing that can regulate its wearer’s body temperature. Created by Ziyuan Wang and colleagues at Nankai University, the design combines electrocaloric devices with state-of-the-art flexible solar cells.
b) The ethical dilemmas of renaming scientific principles that honour fallen idols
It might seem right to rename scientific principles that honour physicists who have done bad things. But doing so raises ethical questions.
c) Thomas Kuhn: new insights into a revolutionary philosopher of science
A review of The Last Writings of Thomas S Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science edited by Bojana Mladenovic.
In 1962 the philosopher Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that shook the history of science and laid important groundwork for an entirely new field – the sociology of science. In this contentious volume, Kuhn portrayed scientific revolutions as extended periods of intellectual conflict that he called “extraordinary science”. Older theories, during such times, can no longer account for new phenomena.
A famous example of such a revolution is the “ultraviolet catastrophe” of the early 1900s. That was when classical physics predicted that the energy emitted by a black body should increase to infinity as the wavelength of the radiation falls. This prediction disagreed with experiments, which showed the energy peaking before dropping away again, forcing physicists to turn to something entirely new: quantum theory.




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