These are the full course materials I prepared for the SPCS Topics in Physics course in 2019. This course was designed to be a three-week crash course surveying many foundational topics in classical and modern physics, aimed at high-achieving 9th and 10th graders with no prior physics experience. For 13 days, students attended a 2.5-hour morning session, which was a mix of lectures, demonstrations, group problem-solving, and hands-on experiments, and spent their afternoons working on the problem sets contained in this document. Toward the end of the course, problem sets were reduced in length to make time for students to work on a final project of their choosing.
Problem sets are available individually in the "Problem Sets" directory, or as a pre-compiled file here. In the remote chance that they are both legible and helpful to someone other than myself, my handwritten lecture notes are in the "Lecture Notes" directory.
- Syllabus
- Problem Set 1: physical units, mathematical models, estimation, vectors
- Problem Set 2: calculus, kinematics, forces
- Problem Set 3: circular motion, angular momentum, gyroscopes
- Problem Set 4: gravity, computational physics
- Problem Set 5: springs, oscillations, waves
- Problem Set 6: electrostatics, magnetism
- Problem Set 7: electromagnetism, light, diffraction, geometric optics
- Problem Set 8: thermodynamics, entropy
- Problem Set 9: black hole entropy
- Problem Set 10: special relativity
I would like to thank the 2019 Topics in Physics instructor, Stewart Koppell, for sharing his course materials, which comprise handful of the problems contained in this document. Additionally, some problems were modified from the AP Physics 1 practice workbook.
I would also like to thank my TAs for this course, Jacob and Annie, for doing an amazing job leading the afternoon sessions. I could not have taught this class without them.
