1.  Building a Global Network of High School Physics Educators

A few years ago Harvard University received an NSF grant to 'build a network to support and improve high school physics education'.  They offer on-line talks a few times a year by big names in Physics Education like Erix Mazur, Eugenia Etkina and Joes Cossett.  They are also posted on their Youtube Channel.
Some previous talks of interest are:

• Thinking and (Failing) like a Scientist: Cultivating Growth Mindsets of High School Physics
• From Mission to Revision: The Iterative Process of Teaching Physics with Joe Cossett, presenter at PHYSCON 2023 and 2024
• Pandemic as Portal: The Human Side of Changing Education
• Education for the Innovation Era: Engaged by Learning
• The Flipping Physics Journey into Asynchronous Flipped Gameful Mastery Learning
• Cultivating a Passion for Physics: Everyday Action for Developing Your Students' Physics Identity
• When Learning Physics Mirrors Doing Physics with Eugenia Etkina
• The Science of Learning Physics: Cognitive Strategies for Improving Instruction
• Transforming your classroom with Eric Mazur

The next topic is Climate Change in the Physics Classroom, with three talks in March and April:
2. Source of Challenging physics problems
The British Physics Olympiad organisation has put the questions from their qualifying exams for the years 2012 to 2021 on their website in a searchable format. The exams consist of short and long questions.  The long questions are each over a page long and often require physics beyond the secondary level, so can be ignored.  The short questions, so called, are often require algebraic manipulation or extensive calculation, but are accessible to able VCE students.  The website enables you to choose long or short questions or both, it also has content categories such as circular motion (16 short questions), momentum (5), PE Effect (5), Refraction (7), etc.
You can select questions you want, view them, decide to include the solutions and finally save the ones you want as a pdf. The access to the pdf file may be blocked by your computer if it is set to block pop-ups, but you can reset that.

The home page of the British Physics Olympiad has links to other resources including:

• full papers with marking schemes for a range of year levels, these papers have multiple choice and short answer sections, and
• under Resources there is a link to Isaac Physics, which is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for students who wish to develop problem solving skills.  There are also teacher support options to manage group work and set assignments.  Isaac Physics is based at Cambridge University, but there is no evidence of access being restricted to the UK.

3. Sig Fig Jokes

• A group of Civil Engineers were at a conference being held in Central Australia. As part of the conference entertainment, they were taken on a tour of Uluru.  "This rock", announced the guide, "is 50 000 004 years old."  The engineers - always impressed by precision in measurement - were astounded.  "How do you know the age of the rock so precisely?" asked one of the group.  "Easy!", came the reply. "When I first came here, they told me it was 50 million years old. I've been working here for four years now."
• "A rock travelling through an atmosphere has a buffeting and compressing effect on the molecules it encounters, causing them to pile up and dissociate into their component atoms. These atoms ionise to produce a shroud of incandescent plasma that is heated to extremely high temperatures - up to 20,000˚C (36,032˚F) - and envelops the space rock, causing it to become super-heated.”

4.  Short practical activities for home: Next Activity
Activity for this newsletter:  Place an open end of wine glass over the top of a small ball or a pea. Move the glass rapidly in a circle so that the ball or pea stays in the glass as you lift it. What happens if you spin the glass faster? 
Check this Youtube video for the short introduction. The answer will be in the next newsletter.

Answer to the activity in the last newsletter is: B.  Also check the entry, titled Physics of Advent, at the bottom of this webpage, on our website for information about the source of these activities.
5. Events for Students

Girls in Physics Breakfast for 2024
Below are the events planned so far.  Bookings are open and flyers are available for confirmed events.

• Ballarat, 8th March. Speaker Prof Emma Ryan-Weber, Swinburne University, Topic: Where does stuff come from?
• Mildura, 19th March. Speaker: Dr Gail Iles, RMIT, Topic: Human Spaceflight and Science in Space
• Monash University, 22nd March. Speaker: A/Prof Kaye Morgan, Monash University, Topic: Playing with Light: X-ray imaging at the Synchrotron
• Traralgon, 17th May, Speaker: Natalie Clements, Medical radiation physicist, Topic: Using physics to treat cancer.
• Central Melbourne, 9th May.  AIP Women in Physics Lecturer for 2024, Prof Susan Coppersmith, UNSW, Topic: From Grains of Sand to Quantum Computers
• Wodonga, 30th May (TBC), Speaker Dr Renee Goreham, University of Newcastle, Topic: Nanobiotechnology: Building the Future of Medicine and Beyond
• Bendigo, (Term 3).  Speaker: Dr Nadia Zatsepin, La Trobe University, Topic: Making molecular movies with X-ray lasers.
• Geelong, (Term 3).  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.

Physics Days at Luna Park in 2024 Bookings, Deposits, Updated worksheets and Risk Assessments.
The bookings for the five days are strong.  Monday has only a small number of places left, the other days in the week still have spare capacity.
Please note that Luna Park requires the 30% deposit to be paid by 14 days before the visit.
There will be no aerobatic displays this year, but realistic flight simulators from the RAAF are expected to be there on all days.  Their location within Luna Park is currently being finalised.
The worksheets have been updated to reflect the terminology of the current study design, that is, use of 'normal force' instead of 'reaction force', force due to gravity instead of weight force, etc. Check the website to download them.  Please select and adapt as you see fit for your students to use on the day. Many teachers print a section as A5 booklets.

Schools require teachers to prepare a risk assessment for such activities.  These can be time consuming to prepare.  If you have a prepared one and are happy for it to be a template, please send it to Vicphysics and we will put a compilation of those we receive on our website.

The dates are Monday, 4th March to Friday, 8th March, for bookings.  The student fee will be $31.50.

6. Events for Teachers 

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

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9.   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)  The American reactor that was closed by fake news
Fake facts, conspiracy theories, nuclear fear, science denial, baseless charges of corruption, and the shouting down of reputable health officials. All these things happened 25 years ago, long before the days of social media, in a bipartisan, celebrity-driven episode of science denial.  Yet the story offers valuable lessons for what works and what does not (mostly the latter) for anyone wanting to head off such incidents.
The episode in question concerned one of the more valuable scientific facilities in the US, the High Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. As I mentioned in a previous column and in my book The Leak, the HFBR was a successful research instrument that was used to make medical isotopes and study everything from superconductors to proteins and metals.
b) Cosmic combat: delving into the battle between dark matter and modified gravity
In the search for a cosmological model that perfectly explains our universe, most astronomers invoke the notion of dark matter. But what if they should instead modify the age-old laws of gravity? In the first of a three-part series, Keith Cooper explores the struggles and successes of modified gravity in explaining phenomena at varying galactic scales, as well as matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.
c)  Nuclear-powered spacecraft: why dreams of atomic rockets are back on
Launching rockets into space with atomic bombs is a crazy idea that was thankfully discarded many decades ago. But as Richard Corfield discovers, the potential of using the energy from nuclear-powered engines to drive space travel is back on NASA’s agenda.

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