[jyl]

My daughter is taking physics in high school. I find the methods very interesting.

I was taught physics as basically an application of math. Masses falling in gravity were simply f = ma and d = at^2/2, etc. Air resistance was another equation with area and velocity. Set up the equations and solve it. Same when we got to thermodynamics, electricity, fields, circuits, etc. It was all basically math problems. Really irritating, ugly math problems with long messy numbers and units that always came up missing.

In this high school class, they do things differently. They have an application which is sort of a virtual lab. To investigate the behavior of objects falling in air, they run virtual experiments - dropping stacks of 5, 10, 15, 25 coffee filters from 2 meters while a virtual "motion detector" measures instantaneous position, velocity, and acceleration. The application spits out graphs of the "logged data" which are realistically messy and jumpy, so that you have to run the experiments repeatedly and average out the data. Then you chart the data and make deductions about the physical laws therein revealed.

So for example we "showed" that, when dropped, the heavier stacks of filters accelerate faster than the light stacks. We thus deduced that, while the force of gravity increases with mass, the opposite force of air resistance probably does not.

This method of learning was confusing to me, but interesting.

I discussed it with a friend who is a physics Ph.D, retired from a career in semiconductor design. He said that in China, where he was educated, physics was taught as math, which was a Russian influence - they are big on theory. He felt that in the US, we teach physics as a real world subject, with students getting the experience of struggling to verify theory in squiggly patchy lab data. He said that is much better.

I have no idea if that is correct. My physics study was 30+ years ago, there was no hint of labwork, and I disliked even the messy equations so much that I bailed on my physics major after a year.

But I'm pretty impressed, overall, at this high school physics course.