News — physics labs

Hook: Your students hear sound every second of every day — yet most of them can't explain how it actually travels. That gap between intuition and understanding is exactly where a great waves and sound unit lives. In this post, you'll get a concrete, NGSS-aligned framework for teaching waves and sound to high school physics students. We'll cover the core concepts students struggle with most, hands-on activities that make abstract ideas tangible, and a few shortcuts that save you prep time without cutting corners. Why Waves and Sound Trip Students Up Here's the thing about waves: they're invisible. When you...

Hook: Most high school students think electricity is magic — flip a switch, light turns on. Teaching electric circuits means replacing that mental model with something real: charges flowing through paths they can trace, measure, and predict. If you've ever watched a student wire a series circuit, stare at a dead bulb, and say "it should work." — you know exactly where this is going. This post breaks down how to teach electric circuits so your students actually get it, from Ohm's Law to parallel vs. series, with classroom-ready activities you can use tomorrow. Why Electric Circuits Trip Up So...

We have all been there. You introduce the concept of momentum, write p = mv on the board, and your students nod along. It seems simple enough—mass times velocity. But then you introduce impulse, the impulse-momentum theorem (FΔt = Δp), and conservation of momentum. Suddenly, the nods turn into blank stares. Students start confusing momentum with energy, or they struggle to understand why a bouncing ball experiences a greater change in momentum than a ball that sticks to the floor. Teaching momentum in high school physics can be a challenge because it requires students to connect abstract mathematical formulas to...

If you've ever taught high school physics, you know the moment. You've just finished explaining Newton's First Law, and a student raises their hand to ask, "But if an object in motion stays in motion, why does my skateboard stop when I stop pushing it?" It's a classic question that reveals one of the most persistent misconceptions in physics: the idea that force is required to maintain motion. Teaching Newton's Laws of Motion is often the first time students are asked to fundamentally rewire how they perceive the physical world. They come into your classroom with years of intuitive, Aristotelian...