Synoptic Physics Questions

To get involved in this project, email your question and solution (preferably as a Word document) to tchillimamp@gmail.com

I started something, got busy, haven’t carried it on for while but now need a bit of a kick to get it going again. There’s loads of excellent SLOP (Shed Loads of Practice) out there for physics but I wanted to add in something as a revision tool that would really challenge students. I’ve been trying to write synoptic questions that bring together the sub-topics within a topic (e.g. linking calculations of energy stores to ideas about efficiency and power) and bringing separate topics together (e.g. linking circuits to energy through power).

I’ve created a document that organises the questions by the topics that they’re about and I’ve written a few questions with lots of sub-questions to guide students slowly through the process. You can see the examples I’ve got so far here: http://bit.ly/SynopticPhysics

To get an idea of the style that I’m going for, here’s a screenshot of one of the questions:

I envisage them being used as a revision tool or as a scaffold to multi-step calculations. Maybe you’d go through one as a class, and then get the students to do an altered one with fewer sub-parts (or just different ones).

If every person that reads this could submit one question (or a few!), with a fully written solution, I could compile them all in this document at the beginning of January (with credit to each person who contributed to the document) for us all to use. Email your synoptic physics questions along with a solution to tchillimamp@gmail.com for me to compile in January. Note: I won’t be monitoring this email over the Christmas break.