Conceptual physics

Thursday 4 November 2021

On Tuesday we had an in service training day on conceptual learning, it turned out to be quite an eye opener. There is a classic physics textbook called Conceptual physics by Paul Hewitt. I have always found the title strange, how can you have physics that isn't conceptual? Well, I am afraid that I have come across many students who are good at physics but have little understanding of the concept. The know that momentum is mass x velocity and can solve problems involving the principle of conservation but have no idea what momentum is. but what do we mean by the concept of momentum? I suppose I am going to have to have a go at explaining it.

  • momentum defines how a body will interact with another
  • conservation of momentum is a consequence of Newton's laws of motion
  • the momentum of a body defines how difficult it is to stop
  • momentum is a vector quantity

What are the top 5 concepts in physics? Ranking concepts is pretty impossible but I'd say something like this:

  1. space and time
  2. mass
  3. energy
  4. the particulate nature of matter
  5. wave motion

All very specific.

This wasn't the eye opening bit, that was hearing what the concepts in other subjects was, e.g. literature.

  1. communication
  2. creativity
  3. perspective
  4. representation
  5. identity
  6. culture
  7. transformation

Uh! I have no idea how these are concepts. A concept in physics is something to be understood to help us to build a picture of the different elements of the universe and the way they interact. I suppose that understanding the culture of the author and characters in a book enables you to understand the book. Our concepts are very specific, these are very general.

Staying with physics, how do we build an understanding of the concepts? By observation and measurement, application, experimentation and analogy. In our sister website, studyib I decided to use video for the explanation of concepts as its much easier to understand something you can see, here is my attempt to explain the concept of momentum:

Here is another.


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