Happy new year and happy new IA. I've been spending part of my holiday preparing for the workshop on the new syllabus that will be taking place in Barcelona in March. There are a lot of people registered so there will be 3 leaders: myself, Trevor Wilson and Tim Kirk. Participants will rotate round the 3 of us with one session all together. My bit is the new IA so I've been testing out the theory by doing some of my own investigations. So far I have done 3 investigations, the first was on the terminal velocity of a balloon. This is for the chapter on IA in my new book so I can't use that in the workshop. The second was on Thomsons e/m experiment and the third on using a balloon as a projectile (the photo shows the toilet roll launcher). These will be published on this website so subscribers will be able to see example marked investigations. There are many different types of investigation but I favour hands on practical supported by computer modelling. I think that an investigation based only on a computer model is a bit pointless and its difficult to write a 6+ page report on a single experiment. It would be possible to do several experiments of course but the report might lose focus.

So, what was it like?

• It's not as difficult as an EE but not far off.
• It was easier to write 6 pages on one idea than I thought it would be.
• More time was spent on analysis than taking measurements.
• Coming up with an idea wasn't that easy.
• Motivation was a problem at times.
• Doing uncertainties for every calculation is tedious and rather pointless when all you are trying to do is see if the experiment matches theory rather than find an accurate value.
• The new criteria allow students to score well even though they have missed something out (I'm starting to see the benefits).
• I think the upper limit of 12 pages is too much, this is EE length.

Soon I'll be starting the new syllabus part of this website. This will include full details of how to apply the new criteria, marked examples and plenty of ideas for investigations.