Category Archives: Teaching Physics

A description of tools and techniques I’ve used in teaching. Meant primarily for teachers

Learning Manim – 2021 Edition

Posted on May 12, 2021 by talkingphysics

If any of you have tried to use my previous instructions on how to use manim you’ll find they no longer work with the latest editions. Updating these instructions is quite an undertaking and given my teaching load, isn’t something … Continue reading →

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Matter & Interactions Section Headings

Posted on July 2, 2018 by talkingphysics

I was looking for the section headings for volume 2 of the 4th edition of Matter & Interactions and couldn’t find them online. Since texts tend to be online these days page numbers don’t matter as much as section titles. … Continue reading →

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Programming Games with Python

Posted on May 18, 2016 by talkingphysics

I’ll be giving a talk at the Science Olympiad Nationals being held here at UW-Stout on gaming physics engines. I thought I’d put up a few resources related to my talk and add some resources on how to get started … Continue reading →

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List of SBG Resources

Posted on December 13, 2015 by talkingphysics

There are quite a few other bloggers that I relied on to get started with learning objectives based grading. Here is a good collection of the links I’ve found invaluable in getting started. Blogs on SBG Shawn Cornally at ThinkThankThunk … Continue reading →

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Special Relativity for K12 Students

Posted on June 29, 2015 by talkingphysics

I put the attached activity together for a group of K12 instructors. I would expect that a high school physics student should be able to complete the entire packet and lower grades can work through parts of the activity. Feel … Continue reading →

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Intro to Electromagnetism – Next Gen Science Standards Workshop

Posted on June 17, 2015 by talkingphysics

Last summer a group of faculty at UW-Stout hosted a group of high school instructors from the area to work on activities related to the Next Generation Science Standards. I’ve attached the activity I developed for the workshop. Feel free … Continue reading →

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LOBA and Standards Based Grading

Posted on August 2, 2013 by talkingphysics

I should probably clarify the distinction between Learning Objectives Based Assessment (LOBA) and Standards Based Grading (SBG). LOBA is a particular implementation of SBG. I want to be clear that LOBA isn’t some brand new grading paradigm that I created … Continue reading →

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Light Doesn’t Stop – “Stopped Light and Image Storage by Electromagnetically Induced Transparency up to the Regime of One Minute”

Posted on July 30, 2013 by talkingphysics

I still remember the group meeting in grad school when someone brought up a news article stating that a researcher had slowed light down to the speed of a bicycle. We got a good laugh at the inaccuracies and clear … Continue reading →

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LOBA Gradebooks

Posted on July 3, 2013 by talkingphysics

I was looking back at my previous posts and noticed I hadn’t talked explicitly about how I keep track of grades for assessments, only about how I use Python and Excel to make my life easier.  I used to include … Continue reading →

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Failure is Always an Option

Posted on February 5, 2013 by talkingphysics

“Failure” is a bad word in our culture, but every teacher knows that students learn by making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. Its the reason that students don’t learn much from watching us solve a problem correctly on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Teaching Physics | Tagged | 2 Comments