News — Physics Teaching

The best first day of physics class activities don't start with the syllabus — they start with something falling, rolling, or refusing to behave the way students expect. You get exactly one chance to answer the question every student walks in with: "Is this class going to be hard and boring, or hard and interesting?"This post gives you a full first-day plan built around three field-tested first day of physics class activities, plus the reasoning behind each one so you can adapt them to your room, your schedule, and your students. Everything here runs with materials you already own and...

Here's the truth about physics review games: the best ones don't feel like review at all. Students think they're competing, escaping, or beating the clock—and the actual learning sneaks in through the side door. If your unit-test scores keep telling you the kids "knew it last week," the problem usually isn't the content. It's that passive review—re-reading notes, redoing the worksheet—doesn't force retrieval. Below are five physics review games that do force it, plus exactly how to run each one without burning a week of prep, and the three mistakes that quietly kill most review games. Why physics review games...

A 0.005 kg bullet can knock down a 5 kg block, and the math that explains it fits on a sticky note. That is the hook your students rarely get when conservation of momentum shows up as a wall of subscripts on the board. A good conservation of momentum activity does two things at once: it makes the "before equals after" rule feel obvious, and it forces students to commit to a prediction before they see the result. Below you'll find classroom-ready ways to teach conservation of momentum that work whether you have a full equipment cabinet or a box...

A good kinematics activity does something a worksheet never can: it makes motion visible before students touch a single equation. If your kids can describe what's happening, the math stops feeling like random letters thrown at a problem. This post gives you four classroom-ready kinematics activity ideas you can run this week, what specific problem each one fixes, the misconceptions they head off, and exactly how to bridge from "I felt it move" to "I can solve for it." No fancy lab gear required, and most of it works even if your budget is zero. Why a kinematics activity beats...