After preparing for this all year I was a bit disappointed with start  IA but now things are hotting up. The idea that all students are walking round with interesting physics questions in their heads is for the most part untrue, it's physics teachers that do that not their students. Although we have talked a lot about how to define a research question and even done an exercise with a bow and arrow, a lot of students found the first steps very difficult. Most turned to the internet for inspiration, googling "physics investigation" or "physics project ideas". A few started to rummage through my cupboards but not many. I gave lots of prompts but most students prefer their own ideas, even though they just got them from the net.

So the start was slow but once started most have started to get stuck into their investigation. This is often the case with EE work, the passion develops. Some interesting stuff going on:

• Parabolas in spinning water
• Splashing balls
• Pendulum waves
• refractive index of water
• speed of waves in a ripple tank
• solar powered cars
• magnetic canon
• drag on a sail
• looping the loop
• bouncing basketballs
• focal length of lenses
• bow and arrow
• electron diffraction
• LCR circuits
• Holding climbing ropes
• elastic properties of rubber
• resonance in strings

One of my hopes was that I could dust of some of the expensive equipment that hasn't been used for some time, as you can see the spectroscope has been aired as has the ripple tank, teltron tube and LCR circuit. But why isn't anyone using the adiabatic gas law apparatus or the Van der Graaf generator (actually I'm glad they're not using that).