ITT: how would you go about presenting physics in an appealing way to a 13-14 years old girl?
The thing is that my aunt asked me to lecture my 13-14 years old cousin for about 1 hour on physics. Strangely enough from what I gathered the purpose of this is not for me to tutor her on what she's struggling on / studying currently, but simply to present physics in an appealing way, to spur her to study it properly herself.
Other urls found in this thread:
thenakedscientists.com
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
I can think of a few things
Show her a homemade device and and explain how it works then build a copy with her. You should be able to brain enough to figure the rest out.
Radioactive decay,
Black body radiation,
Young's interference experiment.
Well, you won't be able to build amazing experiments for her. The closest thing to it is to show her a few videos on YouTube whenever you feel it adds something to whatever you are doing.
Beyond that, my experience is that the best thing you can do is come up with actually good, complete explanations and that is only possible if you actually understand what you are doing. An important thing here is: Focus on the concepts, not the explicit mathematics necessary to conduct the calculations. Illustrations always help. I deeply believe that the general concepts in a physical theory can always be understood if it's explained properly and carefully from ground up and if you have the right illustrations at hand.
Bottom line: Just don't suck, if you do, then you do. Not much you can do about it. There isn't "one weird trick" to turn a shitty teacher into a good one.
that looks more like trying to get her into engineering desu
what you're saying is that I should talk about when classical physics began to struggle and how this was a prelude to qm?
those are good tips for tutoring, but this lecture isn't about teaching. my question revolved more on the topics to cover themselves. I don't know if I should do some history of physics excursus, or if I should focus on some specific topic to see its interesting aspects.
Waste of time, they will end up marrying some rich man and do social work for rest of their lives.
Teach them how to reinstall windows and you'll be giving them more practical knowledge than your aunt learned in her lifetime.
If you're 14 and not already interested in and learning science and technology by yourself, you'll never be.
if she came to respect physics enough to bear it for the rest of her compulsory education I'd be happy, I don't expect it to become her favourite subject or anything of the sort, I'm just told she's struggling with it.
Are you interested in making her your future wife?
If a non-poor kid who already has a teacher is struggling in physics... you can't. She is a brainlet.
I remember back in highschool I struggled in spanish. Then in uni I took a class in it and the professor was really good. She was really teaching it in the best way possible and I felt like I was learning. But then I struggled, failed some midterms, failed some homework and in the end was barely able to get a B.
People are born good at certain things, people are born shit at certain things. You can't escape from that fact of life. If your girl is struggling at the level she's had, despite having books, a teacher and apparently a caring family then she's fucked. She was not born for physics so my best advice would be to make her watch vsauce videos and maybe seduce her into sucking your dick.
And if she ever needs tutoring in math send her to me. I wanna give her a lesson on the Koch curve
I don't have the basis to judge her academically, but I do know the situation isn't nearly as black-or-white as you pictured. One can struggle for a bad teacher/school, bad study habits, bad school or study environment, bad reference material or even unconscious self impositions. I remember that in highschool I rarely even understood the reasons why I loved or hated a particular subject.
thenakedscientists.com
This is a nice experiment. You can also show the Phytagorean cup,
en.wikipedia.org
Or how to use the same principle to fill with fuel a car by taking the fuel from some other vehicle
another useful and interesting thing is how to use a transparent hose to check if two points are at the same high.
Just use daily shit and try to explain how it can be explained and how such explanation leads to some more interesting thing.
If she doesn't get excited by that, fuck her in the ass
I bet she's struggling because of a lack of cock in her life. She needs a good piping you know.
You know what to do.
Jesus there are some dumb people on this board.
Nobody said she was struggling. Middle schoolers are not typically exposed to physics. OP's aunt wants him to just let her know what's out there. You have to know what subjects are out there to study before you can be interested in them.
Most scientists are not child prodigies. Sure they won't revolutionize the field, but that doesn't mean they can't do valuable work.
Please take your retarded "muh studied from age 2" bulshit elsewhere.
>Please take your retarded "muh studied from age 2" bulshit elsewhere.
I never said, you triggered faggot. I didn't even know I wanted to be a mathematician until I graduated high school. But I was always naturally good at it, even when I didn't care much. I was born good at mathematics. I was born shit at the humanities. That is how the world works, kiddo.
>Nobody said she was struggling.
She is struggling though. People who find interest in something find a way to study it on their own, with no need for motivation.
This brings memories of that chinese mathematician who was born during communism and was not allowed to go to school because his dad was an enemy of the state and basically had to hunt for any shitty chinese book he could find. Then he proved one of the most important theorems in number theory. The twin prime conjecture but with primes of distance 70 million. Bretty gud.
It also brings memories of myself. No one ever encouraged me to go into pure mathematics. Heck, if anything I was discouraged. But I was born good at it and you cannot go against nature.
Even those mediocre scientists you talk about were also born good at whatever they are doing now. They just weren't born good enough to revolutionize it.
But who cares, maybe OP's jailbait girlfriend is the one exception. The one person not born good at something that will then become good at it, Against all the laws of nature. Sure. Go for it pal.
#feminism my man. You got it! YES! Time to close that STEM gap boiiiiiiiiiiiii
am confused, shes 13-14, meaning shes in grd 9-10, whats she doing learning physics?
in my day (12 years ago) we only learned physics in maybe grd 11 and def grd 12.
>whats she doing learning physics?
Her feminist aunt wants to brainwash her into becoming a #physicsgirl
Chemistry experience, like a potato battery or an homemade volcano.
I think I'm liking the idea of loosely talking about a bit of everything going from mechanics to , mentioning fun application like the ones you listed
you seem to think I want her to get a phd in quantum field theory while I wrote here in europe it's how it works. as for what she's actually studying now, I'm curious myself, I'll ask at the lecture
>asked to teach physics
>teaches chemistry instead
What's wrong with getting a young woman interested in engineering... are you a sexist?
Chemistry is physics, especially atomistic.
Grad 9 physics in France (my country) is basically telling you about the star systems, gravitation and shit, and maybe U = RI, plus some shiny experiences to get the kids interested.
I have no tips for the lecture itself, but if you'll show her verit/vsauce, she might keep on watching them afterwards and get a "that's cool" notion. You can't make someone fall in love w/ a subject in 1h (IMO)
I'm pretty sure english videos are outside of her league for some years still
whats happening in pic related?
I would raise her to think that the topic of how things work is interesting. Once they pass 10 (or thereabouts) things get really hard.
induction heating
>that looks more like trying to get her into engineering desu
engineering is applied physics
pure physics is almost as useless as pure math
Guessing here. As it falls in, the magnetic field increases causing Eddy currents to be induced. This causes a force upward and the internal resistance of the object (lead?) causes heating and eventually melting. This is also why it spins around. Look up magnetic breaking. After it melts, it stretches out and the effect weakens to the point that gravity takes over. The work is being done by the battery, which must be enormous.
They're always called "experiments" in English, never "experiences". I suppose you thought those were synonyms like expériments/expériences (I think?).
Fuck her OP
...
Physics is much more than maths, it is also about the premise and the reasoning. One of my favourite examples is about why the sky is blue. It is, on the surface, such a simple question but you can get a lot out of it. For there are two utterly different yet quite correct answers that demonstrate this.
The immediate Veeky Forums response is about scattering dependent on wavelength that scatters 400 nm more than 700 nm, thus we see te blue everywhere. Sure, that isn't a bad answer.
Yet the answer that makes you think is that "blue" is the very name of the colour we are "calibrated" as children to refer to the sky.
Ok, so an experiment.
Start with a glass of water. Add a little milk. See that in daylight the mix turns blue-ish. Note that in incandescent light however this effect is less seen. Reason is, of course, that the milk spreads light that already was there, not that it adds light.
Next hold the glass up to fluorescent light (sunlight can be dangerous here!) and note the red hue. That is what remains when you remove the red, the colour of sunset.
Enjoy.
>expériences
Yes, the other word is expérimentations.
Just explain about how physics is all about solving problems and describing the world. Just talk about the simple, yet deeply profound and impactful concepts in physics. For example, Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravitation. Talk about some of Maxwell's work aswell, that shit always blows my mind when I read over it.
BUT, most importantly, talk about how physical laws were proven and their applications.
Find one basic concept about science to teach.
If you do this you have to get right to the point straight away.
Less than a minute. Otherwise her mind will be off somewhere else.
Then once the point is made no more than 5 minutes expanding the point. Examples. Inferences. Simple experiment. Let her speak if she wants. Do not make it a mini lecture.
Keep it simple.
Then let it end. If she asks questions or for further explanations just keep feeding her answers. Satisfy her curiosity.
If her curiosity is not aroused, if she asks no questions or for further explanations, then she has no natural talent and no interest and you are trying to teach a pig to sing, wasting your own time and will just end up annoying the pig.
If however she does show an interest then prepare another short, to the point, lesson for next time. However the most critical thing now is to start teaching her how to learn by herself. How to access information. How to study. How to build a study schedule This is more important in the long run.
Ex teacher.
does she like power rangers?
i have an idea
I would power in her ranger if you know what I mean.
Putting a kid into an unsolicited, completely random lecture is not going to go well. At that age they're already starting to become aware of the fact that they have to do a lot of stuff they don't want to, doing this will just make her feel like she's being forced to do yet another boring activity before she even does it.
It should happen naturally while hanging out. Go out and do something with her, and occasionally talk about the stuff you do. Make it a social thing, that'll be more successful than the best lecture for someone that age.
>she is struggling with physics even though she doesn't know what physics is
This is either b8 or you're too dumb to understand how wrong that statement is.
Present some fantastical ideas of how her smartphone could be EVEN BETTER to charge without a cable and record EVEN BETTER VIDEO!
Basically appeal to shit a retarded 13 year old would care about. Then explain how physics does that.
how did you know my idea
Please for the love of god, get her a copy of "Thinking Physics". It has interesting questions like pic related which I doubt even "physics majors" here could correctly answer. It builds physics intuition first, so you could do a 1 hour back and forth on two or three questions which require very little math but lots of actual thinking.
I can confirm that most physics majors (at least where I work) don't know the answer to this question. The good ones can reason it out, but it takes some time.
a guy walking down the road sees a woman raising a boy with a crane. the guy asks the lady "what's going on here?" and the lady says "my son wants to be a physicist." the man then asks "so why the hell are you raising him with a crane." the woman responds "because he doesn't have enough potential."
Is the answer b?
My reasoning is that one horse pulling a pair of pants attached to a stationary pole is qualitatively eaqual to a horse pulling a pair of pants attached to a stationary horse.
i feel like it wouldn't change the tension at all, but i don't know why
somebody pls post an explanation
The force one horse pulls is the same in both cases. In the case with two horses, they both pull with equal and opposite force. In the case with one horse, the poll "pulls" with a force equal and opposite the single horse (the normal force cancels it--Newton's second law) If you were to draw out a force diagram, you would get the same thing with different labels. It's late. I realize that was a shitty explanation.
at my high school (US, Washington state), we had AP physics in 9th grade (12-13 year olds) so that you could easily finish both of the ap calculus courses before 10th/11th grade and instead just take vector calc, linear alg, or diff eq in 11th grade
is she hot? this is a legit question, if shes hot or not influences what kind of teenage experience shes having, and therefore what is the optimal way of teaching to her
>incestfag
Oh of course
its the same right
fuck I'm a physics major so i should be able to know this
>>when i was yung
father taught me about newton's laws by sliding ice cubes on our floors
what about just showing her cool videos explaining something about imaginary numbers (eg NIM)?
Well, yes and no. Modern pedagogy has thinking more in terms of limits and magnitude of learning.
Some kids who start of not getting it can really accelerate and get it once it starts to click and the momentum carries them.
Some kids won't get it no matter how hard they try.
Some kids will get it and learn slowly.
Some kids will get it and learn quickly.
A lot of it comes down to early childhood, genes and natal nutrition. There's a bunch of literature that I have in my dorm room regarding this but the gist of it is yeah more or less kids are either shit at or good at learning but the meaning of that is extremely variable.
That's not to say its 1:1 regarding the simple factors, sometimes kids who didn't read till they were 10 and had shitty childhoods can do math like a motherfucker, but that's rare.
It generally follows a normal curve with the mean at what we would consider "below average", simply because teaching can absolutely overcome a lot of the issues that arise with natural learning capabilities.
Where the fuck in washington, my school didn't have that shit untill 10th grade
>She was not born for physics so my best advice would be to make her watch vsauce videos and maybe seduce her into sucking your dick.
>and maybe seduce her into sucking your dick
Quality post, my friend
9th grade is usually 14 year olds and some 15 year olds, dipshit
>engineering is applied physics
>pure physics is almost as useless as pure math
When tutoring someone, one of the most important things to recognize is what's interesting to the student. Let her ask the questions to start with, and present based on what you know. If you want to jump start her ideas for questions, enter with an interesting physics exhibit like pic related, and let her probe around the problem of how it works and how she might construct other similar effects.
Your goal is to have a very basic and interesting introductory lesson in physics, and the best way to accomplish that is to appeal to your audience. Since physics includes the science of the everyday, your prerogative is to relate physics to her through the everyday. Maybe she's interested in makeup, perhaps she heats up when she sees a certain boy, perhaps she's just mystified by how the microwave works. You need a point to relate it to her, a subject that interests her, if you're going to establish a rapport.
Also, because your ultimate objective is to present her interest to your aunt, you want to leave her with a question in her head. Leave her wondering, and she will thirst for more. Such is the way of the woman.
Observe the Moon, tonight and next night. Point out how it moves wrt. Venus (as a reasonable reference point, not accurate but will do). Point out how the thin sicle grows. Ask why the Moon hangs the way it does over the horizon, low in summer, high up in winter.
Just get her to think about these things she no doubt has seen but never observed and thought about,
You aren't going to get a 9th grader enthralled with physics if they aren't already.
Wrong. I didn't care about physics and math until my 20's.
I mean really care. Not just rote learning to pass the SAT.
Not even my elite private school did calculus in grade 9 you're talking out of your shitter m8
Stop dicking about with trivial everyday uses of science that no one gives a fuck about.
Just give her the general relativity
Nothing changes right? For the horse not to move as it pulls, the pole needs to put up an equal amount of resistance as a horse pulling in the other direction.
It's the same. l2 free body diagram.
Just take her to a science museum.
Mechanics is a good way of teaching physics/calculus/linear algebra... But fuck me did it bore me to shit. It's actually nothing like actual physics, and I think the poor first impression people get from mechanics is why more people aren't interested in physics.
It's like explaining why maths is interesting while simultaneously only using quadratic equations as an example.
Go to some bar and play Eight-ball.