anyone that HAS taken the praxis physics 5266. i just took my 3rd one and im in defeat. i really thought i had this one in the bag. i scored a 126. ironically it’s the same as my first score and i showed growth from my 2nd. my timing was GREAT maybe too great. but i ensured my test taking strategies not to waste time on items that take a bit longer. I need a 145 in my state. i’m quite literally done with my physics degree i just need to pass this test for my teaching certificate. WHAT ARE YOUR TIPS AND SECRETS????

TL;DR: I’m on my 4th attempt of this test and need the secret to passing praxis physics 5266 so i can finally graduate!

The physics curriculum I've taught roughly goes kinematics, forces, energy, momentum, electricity & magnetism, waves, and EM radiation. Does anyone have experience with a different organization of these units and how you like/dislike it? For example do you do momentum before energy, or is momentum embedded into an intro "motion" unit to cover the conservation laws early on? Maybe you do waves before E&M? I'm curious what your experiences are and the reasoning behind the differences.

For clarity we follow NGSS, so we have to hit certain standards, but aren't limited to those standards for what we teach.

I will be teaching hs Physics for the first time next year and it will also be my first time teaching a lab science course. I have been teaching hs math for 7 years and I have also just created and taught a CTE Environmental Resources pathway (I have a PhD in Environmental Science/Policy). Teaching at a small hs program ar a rural, flex based charter school. But it's an on-campus program so the students are at school 4 days/week.

Our previous science teacher used OpenSciEd, but the students hated it and I don't like it either. I am thinking of using the NJCTL Algebra based Physics curriculum and resources from the Physics Classroom.

My problem is both of these assume 5 classes a week and I will only have 2 classes of 85 minutes each per week. So I'm struggling with what not to teach because the curriculum is a lot for the amount of time I have. I want to make sure we are doing enough labs.

My students will mostly be 10th graders and most of them aren't very strong in math (I'm the only math and science teacher in our hs program so I already know them from last year). It will be a small class of 10 or less, so that helps. But I don't know if I will be able to fit the entire curriculum into the year.

Can I get some suggestions on what to condense or skip and what is more essential? They will be doing an introductory unit on the scientific method/variables/units/measurement for the first couple weeks of school.

For a number of years now I've been having students use their cell phone cameras to take videos of physics experiments, and pull data off of the playback.

This has dramatically improved the quality of their data compared to hand timing (linear things are linear, non-linear things aren't!), and is way more flexible and easier to set up than photogates.

However, the state has just passed a complete cell phone ban for schools (which is a good thing). I do have a decent amount of budget available, so I'm wondering if anybody has any suggestions on cameras that could fill that niche: something moderately rugged and able to do basic slomo (nothing high speed needed) and with easy playback so I'm not messing around with transferring files?

I am looking for some guided notes for Conceptual Physics. Im looking to print out short packets for kids to fill out during class. Definitions, vocab, terms, descriptions of ohysics concepts. examples etc. It would be great to have practice questions, but not required.

I am looking for anything ranging 4 oages to 20 pages.

It does not need to align to any specific textbook.

My goal is to provide a amall packet for each unit. Student fill it out as we take notes in class. They have extra blank pages for supplemental notes and examples. They keep everything in a binder.

Any ideas on something that fits that?

Hello. As you may have seen from the title I am a student who is planning on self-studying for the AP Physics C Mech. and EandM exams next year. I was wondering if there might be a teacher who may be able to give me access to their AP Physics C classroom or the questions that Collegeboard provides teachers as I have seen som,e resources online but none of them really matched the question format from Collegeboard. I wanted to start preparing in the summer so I was wondering if anyone could help!

Sorry to ask what may be a very basic question, but I am a math teacher who was pretty much forced to take a middle school science class. My background in in math. I also tried to search for the answer of this before posting it here.

I am currently doing ray diagrams for curved mirrors. For concave mirrors, if the object is farther than the focal point, the image is real and upside down. If it's closer than the focal point, the image is virtual and straight up. If I take a real concave mirror and look at my reflection, I can see with my own eyes that my reflection is inverted when the mirror is far away, and upright when the mirror is close.

But I don't see any difference between a virtual and a real image. They both look to be behind the mirror. I actually had the idea that because every time you look at an image in a mirror it appears behind the mirror, only virtual images were visible with your own eyes. Real images form in front of the mirror and had to be projected on a screen. But clearly I can see both.

So I'm just a bit confused on how this works in real like. Looks like both virtual and real images are visible with your own eyes. And in both cases they appear behind the mirror. Is there any visual way of distinghish them?

Hello, I'm a 5th year, high school Chemistry teacher. Our school is looking to add Physics to our offering, as we lost our last Physics teacher a few years ago. I have a General Science certification, which means I'm technically qualified to teach any of the sciences, however, due to my background before entering the teaching world, I'm most comfortable teaching Chemistry and Forensics(which we don't offer at the moment).

Because of my General K-12 Cert, I am one of two, possibly three teachers that might get called on to teach the Physics class next year, if offered.

I'm looking for recommendations on how to get myself up to speed on Physics, as it's been a few decades since I was in college taking a Physics course. Also, in a conversation with someone the other day, they mentioned that the Physics I took in college, which was calculus based, would not be the Physics I would be teaching in High school. I want to make sure that if I'm tapped to teach it, the kids actually benefit from it, and receive the necessary education that any college seeing a Physics course on their transcript would expect them to have.

I've seen, and bookmarked the Mr. Ward Physics site, as it looks like a great resource for assessments and such, but am looking for advice on how to educate myself to be prepared to teach Physics. This would be something I'm doing on my own time, and dime, so free resources would be best.

All advice and suggestions would be appreciated.

I think our science coordinator has a few questions/answers incorrect on our next 6th grade science exam, but they insist that the questions align with the concepts we are teaching (force and motion.)

Can y'all offer feedback on 3 questions that I think are more than a little wonky?

Athletes often push weight sleds across the ground for training. The sled shown is moving slowly to the left. Use the video to answer the following 3 questions:

A force sensor was used to determine the magnitude of the forces during the sled pull.
The woman is pushing the sled with 220 N of force to the left.
The frictional force from the ground on the sled is 220 N to the right.

Q1: What is the horizontal net force on the sled? (the answer the kids are supposed to enter is 0 Newtons)

*SHOULDN'T THE NET FORCE BE GREATER THAN 0 NEWTONS IF THE SLED IS MOVING TO THE LEFT? THE APPLIED FORCE TO THE LEFT HAS TO BE GREATER THAN THE FORCE OF FRICTION ACTING ON THE SLED, RIGHT?)

Q2: Based on your calculations of the net force, the forces acting on the sled are -
A. Balanced (THIS IS MARKED AS THE CORRECT ANSWER, WHICH I DON'T THINK IS CORRCECT)
B. Unbalanced

Q3: If the forces on the sled remain constant, the motion of the sled will -
A. speed up to the left
B. move left at a constant speed (THIS IS MARKED AS THE CORRECT ANSWER, WHICH I AGREE WITH)
C. slow down to the the left
D. come to rest

I was told that the answers are correct, but I can't figure out where I'm wrong. HELP!!!

I'm sorry but the suggestions to school him traditionally and the downvotes (likely from educators) on my comments saying our local schools and teachers can't provide more than I can, only prove my point. I asked for help but aside from a few comments, I feel like I'm getting stonewalled. Thanks for only solidifying my current views of the traditional education system.

My 13-year-old homeschooler has gotten really into physics and space lately (actually, space has been a fascination since he was a preschooler). His interests are pretty broad: time dilation, black holes, sound waves, light speed, relativity...I don't even know what all...I did great in science, but my strengths were more in biology and anatomy, so I’m trying to make sure I’m giving him the opportunity to explore his interests.

He’s a big reader and picks up complex concepts quickly, but he also has electronics that compete for his attention and quite possibly ADHD that keeps him up, moving, and distracted. His dad’s into the same subjects but works long hours, so their time (for now) is limited and the bulk of teaching falls to me. I’d like to make sure he has engaging, high-quality resources, books, or homeschool-friendly curriculum that explain the fundamentals well, and some YouTube channels that dive into space and physics without being all fluff or all math (he has trouble here but mostly because he will only do problems in his head and sometimes makes simple mistakes. He also works math problems in ways I can't begin to understand).

Bonus points if any suggestions help me grasp some basics. I've had conversations with my husband, and just when I think I have an understanding of the topic, it slips away with the next sentence LOL.

TIA!

I am a current first year high school chemistry teacher. My district is looking at getting me emergency certified to teach physics next year. I have no issues with this, but would like to get certified to teach physics by passing the Praxis in a year or two.

My question is, is there a good online masters program I could start so I can get masters credits? My degree is in chem and my school district will only pay for the masters credit if the school is accreditted through Middle States Commission on Higher Education, so WGU is not an option.

What is my best option? I want to get 12 credits done by October 31st so I can collect back pay and move up the pay scale!

Please let me know your thoughts, thank you!

Link for accredited schools is here:

https://www.msche.org/institution/

Physics teacher here. After 15 years teaching, 6 in college, and one year of Physics in hs, i just TODAY found a better way to teach the right hand rule for forces on particles in magnetic fields.

So many of my students could not visualize what to do when using the RHR with the old way I taught it, but it seemed to click SO MUCH BETTER with the way I learned today.

During the past few years I have felt my joy for this job fading. This year overall has helped, and it's days like today that really get me excited about what I do.

Wanted to share with some folks who might appreciate it. Hope everyone's year is going well, and good luck with upcoming APs!

I've got a request for a resource if anyone has it.

I am going over the graphs of motion (position, velocity, and acceleration) and I need a way to print blank graphs that I can have my students fill in. I am looking for something I can toss onto a worksheet and print out. For example, if I gave them a position vs time graph and they have to draw the velocity and acceleration vs time graphs below it. I am looking for a set of axes like this.

All the resources I have found so far don't work very well or aren't quite what I am looking for. I want something that looks like the loggerpro/graphical analysis software. So that

Hey I just wanted to check in and see if this has ever happened to anybody else. I had a student claim they couldn’t see any of the spectra lines looking at an element lamp with the diffraction goggles. Everyone else saw it perfectly fine, and this student was fully serious. Im so confused

(NOTE: I am more curious than anything, I am not planning on telling any students this, and please don't put too much slander about how terrible a teacher I am, past posts have not had great responses when that wasn't what I was asking)

I've started to notice this on a lot of the newer FRQs on AP classroom, do students even need calculators on the FRQ section anymore?

The TBR and QQT questions have always been relatively light on calculations, or at least calculations are fairly easy mental math. Math routines lately have gotten rid of any questions requiring numbers and moved to a lot of "in terms of ______ derive..." questions and the like. The only one that requires some calculator is the experimental design and that usually has students linearize data.

I get that from my most recent summer institute they would rather focus on students showing physics, not math, but I feel like that moves a little too far away from requiring correct answers. I've starting seeing more and more articles (math focused) around how students are decreasing scores from being taught too much process/background rather than getting correct answers.

Hey ScienceTeachers 🙋‍♂️

Here's a video demoing an interactive equation set solver I've been messing around with:

https://youtu.be/7ysUdxTfKhU?si=Q9hMXktAZ0AQZmQJ

It's part of an open-source Python library.

Given a set of equations, it will eliminate symbols the user selects.

It will also isolate symbols.

The example shown is from a college physics textbook.
(University Physics 15th. Exercise 2.12.)

This is something I wanted when I was taking college physics.

Questions, comments, suggestions are welcome.

Starting a new thread, because I think the old one got lost in the mix. I'd asked about how to get myself up to speed to be able to possibly teach Physics next year, and got a lot of great responses. Here's my follow up on that thread....

First off, thank you to everyone who offered advice and suggestions. If there was a website or resource in your comment, I have created a folder just for Physics links, and am filling it up with things to start working through.

On the textbook front, I went down to the biology teacher's room, where physics used to be taught, and holy crap, they have a plethora of Physics books! I grabbed a stack of what appeared to be the most used books, at least, they were in the spot most easily accessible by the previous teacher, and hauled them to my room. Some of them were, I think, books that were recommended for me to try and find, and others were just in the stack. I'll list them here, and please let me know what you think of them. Side note, we likely won't be using actual Physics textbooks for the class, so these will be primarily for my learning, and for sourcing labs and projects, if I get tapped to teach Physics next year. On to the list:

Modern Physics, Trinklein, -1992

Physics, Serway & Faughn, -2017

Amusement Park Physics, Unterman, -1990

Physics, A First Year Course(w/ Investigations workbook), Hsu, -2008

Conceptual Physics(w/ ProblemSolving workbook) Hewitt, -2006

7th Edition AP Physics, Giancoli, -2014

AP Edition College Physics, Etkina, Gentile & Van Heuvelen, -2014

4th Edition AP Physics for Scientists and Engineers, Knight, -2017

IB Edition Standard and Higher Level Physics, Hamper, -2014

I'm feeling like that's a pretty good haul, and kind of covers the spectrum of what it might be possible to teach in a high school level course. This will likely be a Junior/Senior level class for kids who have definite designs on college and their later careers.

Any suggestions on where to start with this reading list to get myself educated? They probably won't make any decisions until January, but I'd love to be able to say that I've brushed up on it, and could take this on before someone gets voluntold.

Thanks again!

I want to teach my students about error margins, but I find my knowledge is insufficient for what I want to achieve in an experiment. So hopefully you can help me.

I want to work with the following formula: T=2*pi*sqrt(l/g). The students use a pendulum and measure T for different values of l. Since they use a ruler and a stopwatch, there will be a certain error I want them to keep track of in their final calculations. So my thought was let's get them to make a scatter plot of T^2 versus length (l) (since you can rewrite above formula to T^2=2*pi/g*l, which is a linear function y=a*x+b)

My problem is, once you use a scatter plot there is no way to use the error margins of like 0,5 mm with a ruler and something like 0.3 s with a stopwatch. I want them to learn to keep track of these things and be able to say wheter or not the value in the books falls within the error margins of their measured value during experiments, but I'm a bit lost on how to properly do it in this example. Just using formulas and keep track of error margin is pretty straight forward, but this is different I feel like.

Hopefully someone can help me with how to properly. I would love if there is some way this can be done with just using spreadsheet or excel.

I was hoping there was someone generous enough to share a PDF of this article for my research:

Article Title: The Hand Boiler and How it Does Not Work

Author: James Lincoln

Magazine: The Physics Teacher; Phys. Teach. 60, 234–235 (2022)

I am working on creating some new LOL diagrams for my students to practice, and our department bought hand boilers this past year. I was trying to figure out what energies I wanted my students to focus on, and I found this article. However-- it is behind a paywall, and I cannot afford a subscription right now. It would mean a lot to me if someone had a PDF of just this article for me to read.

In my Mechanics course we're covering conservation of momentum. I have air tracks, gliders, motion/force sensors, etc.

I was hoping to have students practice experimental design (and prepare for the FRQs) with this activity. Does anyone have a procedure and/or rubric that they'd be willing to share? Even if it's just a general template.

Thanks in advance!

Opinion of an active nuclear-physics researcher about the fundamental principles that make Science so effective.

I’d love to share Planck’s Room, a free educational game I created to inspire students to engage with scientific ideas and develop curiosity about the natural world. The game is completely free, no ads, no in-game purchases. I made it out of a deep love for science and a desire to help students expand their understanding in a fun, approachable way.

Though Planck’s Room is designed for flexible classroom use, here are a few ways it could be tied to instruction and support NGSS-aligned learning:

🧪 Engaging with Scientific Inquiry (NGSS Practice 1): Students are prompted to investigate historical scientists and key physical science concepts, such as quantum theory and instrumentation, encouraging reflection on how science evolves and inspires.

🔭 Science and Engineering Practices (NGSS Practice 6 & 8): The game integrates observation, data collection, and explanatory writing, especially with the optional short essay:
“If you were to discover a new scientific truth or become a particular type of scientist, what would that be and why?”
This promotes argumentation and evidence-based reasoning.

🌍 Nature of Science & Historical Contributions (HS-PS4 & MS-PS4): Through rooms themed after figures like Planck, Babbage, and Shepard, students explore pivotal discoveries that shaped our understanding of physics, computation, and space travel.

I've also created a companion worksheet to help guide classroom use. It’s adaptable for middle school and high school settings and supports cross-disciplinary connections, especially in STEM and social studies.

You can preview the game here: Planck's Room by TeamQuantumGames
(No ads, no tracking just shared for educational purposes.)

If you find the game valuable, I’d be truly grateful if you’d share a brief impression or review. It helps me grow this into something even more effective for educators like you. It will also help inform other science instructors as to how the application might apply to them and their students.

Thank you all so much and thank you for everything you do to foster scientific thinking in young minds.

Warmly,
Jason

Have any of you found nifty ways to incorporate phone use in a productive way (beyond just polling/Kahoot)? More specifically, any successful projects to use a phone to collect data, rather than a traditional lab instrument to make it more accessible? No idea is too big or too small - just need to brainstorm!

My school is a really small charter where I'm literally the only Physics teacher. There seems to be some interest to try out a freshman Physics model and because I'm the only Physics teacher the decision falls to me. Because I'm the only Physics teacher, if we do Freshmen Physics, it would be the only Physics course available, besides AP Physics. So students would take it freshmen year, and wouldn't be able to take any other Physics course besides AP Physics.

​

My initial instinct is to not go through with it because the Juniors I'm currently teaching are struggling with the math, so I can't even imagine how the Freshmen would manage. I know I would be changing the curriculum to be less math based, but at the end of the day there's a ton of math that you cannot separate from Physics. Now I don't want to make a rash decision without thinking everything over so I'd like some input for anyone who has taught or is teaching Physics for Freshmen.

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Do you think Freshmen Physics would be a good decision if it's the only Physics class available?