Teaching Physics to Young People: Challenges & Opportunities

[Watt Oliver]

starting next winter term, I will be voluntarily invovled in a new project teaching basic physics to young people from around the world (e.g. refugees or people wanting to study natural sciences in Europe). Ideally, the students will receive some basic understanding of physics through my course. They will learn some Newtonian mechanics, electrostatics, and about electrical circuits.

A main problem is that the students, which will attend my course, have almost no experience in doing experiments. I would like to be aware what challenges might occur because of this fact. Do you have any ideas, suggestions, experiences which you would like to share with me? How can I overcome this problems the best way?

I would appreciate your help very much!

Best wishes

 

[berkeman]

Welcome to the PF.

There are a couple ideas for basic experiments in this thread, along with ideas about how best to teach them to beginning students:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/teaching-high-school-ap-physics.973702/#post-6220342
I would keep the experiments simple and interesting, especially at first.

 

[Watt Oliver]

Thank you very much for your answer and the link! There are very interesting suggestions, and I will keep browsing through the different answers given there.

 

[jrmichler]

Keep in mind that some foreign students have even less hands-on experience than you would think possible. While working on my ME master's degree, I was guiding a EE student who wanted an MS project with a mechanical flavor. She got exactly that by building a transducer for my (then) future doctoral project. One conversation (abridged) went something like this:

Q: How do I fasten these parts together?
A: With a bolt.
Q: What's a bolt?
A: (Detailed explanation)
Q: How do I tighten the bolt?
A: With a wrench.
Q: What's a wrench?

She was very intelligent, but came from a culture where people from her class did not even touch tools. She, and other people from that part of the world, are typically very willing to learn and recognize that things are done differently in our part of the world. That's why they are here.