Win a Free Astronomy Trip to the Alps

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The European Southern Observatory is organising an Astronomy Camp at the beautiful (if awkwardly-named) Astronomical Observatory of the Autonomous Region of the Aosta Valley, in the Italian Alps. It’s pictured above, and sounds like an impressive place to hang out for a week of lectures, hands-on activities, observing sessions… and winter sports and excursions. Here are the details:

  • 26th December 2016 to 1st January 2017
  • Open to students aged 16-18 years (ie. born 1998, 99, 2000).
  • Working language: English
  • Camp fee: €500… but read on!

How to apply

The camp is open to maximum 56 secondary school students from a list of countries including the ESO Member States (which includes the UK). There are more details and a web form on the Camp web page, and you’ll also need to submit a video. Your film should be in English, last no longer than three minutes, and be on the theme: “I would most like to discover/invent …… because……..”.

Submission deadline: 4th October 2016.

The applicant with the best entry from one of ESO’s Member States will win an ESO bursary to cover the complete cost. In the UK, the Royal Astronomical Society will also contribute to costs for the country’s best entries.

This sounds like one of those things you never quite dream you could win, but somebody has to, and for those who do it could be a life-changing experience. The full programme (on the camp website) looks jam-packed, exhausting, and huge fun. Get your application in, and please please let us know if you’re one of the 56 students. Send us a postcard, at least!

Heading image: ESO/V. Vicenzi.

Careers in the (primary) classroom?

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There have been some news articles recently about universities, primary schools and careers.

In the first article, Teach First recently called for universities to work with primary schools as part of University ‘widening participation’ work.  These are activities that are focused on ensuring that progression to university is open to students whatever their background.  At the moment, many universities focus mostly on children in year 9 and above. According to Teach First, currently only around 1200 pupils on Free school meals go to Russell Group Universities each year, out of 800,000 young people in receipt of free school meals.  As a result, they think that children should taught about university much earlier, from primary school.

A second report was published by UCAS.  They surveyed students who had applied to go to university in 2015 about what encouraged or put them off.  The survey found that around 35% of the students had decided that they wanted to go to university before the age of 10, and that they were more likely to get into ‘competitive universities’.

Finally, in a riposte to the Teach First suggestion, the Times Educational Supplement posted an article written by Joe Tyler who works for the Philosophy Foundation.  Tyler believes that rather than pushing information about university on ever younger children, we should focus on enhancing their happiness.

He says:

Some children want things and wish for things that they might never have: becoming a world class footballer, rapper, pop star. In a world of uncertainty, we never know for sure what is going to happen, and some children will get their wish.

Yet as carers for these children we might think it better to make sure they focus on getting their good education first, by chipping away at their dreams and putting them on to the ‘safer’ route by telling them to think more about getting on with their studies and extra-curricular activities which will get them in to the best university.

The combination of these three articles got me thinking.

I’m a bit frustrated by the focus of Teach First and UCAS on Russell group and similar universities.  The Russell group of universities consist of 24 universities.  In 2014/15 there were 163 universities.  At a rough calculation, the Russell group can accommodate just over 6% of the UK’s undergraduates.  Focusing on attendance at only those universities is, to my mind, quite narrow-minded.*

That aside, I do think that Teach First and UCAS have a point.  Whilst telling young children very specific details about particular universities probably isn’t appropriate, I do think that we need to let them know about the wide range of future careers available to them.  It’s all very well for the Philosophy Foundation to suggest that we encourage young children to follow their dream and become a footballer or a pop star, but for the vast majority of children, that will not happen.  Telling them about other jobs, isn’t expecting them to take the safe route, and might show them something else that they could dream about becoming.

That’s what we aim to do here at Think Physics.  Our primary workshops are focused on different STEM fields or careers, linked to the primary curriculum.  We have workshops about botanists, volcanologist, and naval architects amongst others.  The pupils we work with know that the science they study can lead into a whole range of different jobs.

Let’s encourage our children to have a good education by showing them that their dreams can be much bigger than they imagined.

Testing bridges-1650thin

Structural engineering workshop

*Declaration of interest: Think Physics is not based at a Russell Group university.

Summer holiday science

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At this stage in the summer holiday, sometimes it can get a bit harder to find new things to do with the kids.  However, the Royal Institution might just come to your rescue!

They’ve produced a series of short videos showing some simple, cheap and easy science-based activities that you can do at home, called ExpeRimental.  The great thing about the videos is that they’re aimed at encouraging children and adults to explore science ideas with each other.  You’re not trying to teach your kids the science, but ask questions about the science together.

Through the activities children and adults get chance to

PLAY,   LOOK,   ASK

 

The activities include rubber band cannons, balancing sculptures, cakes in a cup and lots more.

Once you’ve tried out the ExpeRimental activties, then we have some activities on the Think Physics site for you to have a go at:  growing seeds, fingerprints, and seeing rainbows, and bubbles

My favourite ExpeRimental video shows Tilly and her mum making glasses sing.

Why don’t you try it at home?

 

Raspberry Pi Day of Making: Apply now!

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation (the lovely folks who spend the money brought in by those tiny computers we all love so much) are gearing up to launch a new programme for teenagers. As part of the build-up, they’re hosting a Day of Making in Cambridge on 23rd August.

For the day, they’re looking for energetic 12-18 year-olds who are very comfortable in front of a camera. It sounds like they’re going to film people completing projects, then use that footage in their project launch. Hence, they’re taking applications via Youtube film submission.

Deadline: Sunday 7th August (this Sunday!)
Application: via 30-60 sec Youtube film and web form here.

The Foundation will cover travel costs, and “…if you’re coming a really long way we can provide accommodation for you and your parent or guardian.” Yay!

The day could be amazing, and the Foundation folks are very, very cool indeed. So get your application in!

Chain Reactions (with electronics)

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Like everyone else delivering ‘maker’ education, we use chain reaction machines in some of our workshops. There’s a lot of fun to be had, and some intriguing mechanisms to be discovered. But there are also some classic problems:

  1. Connecting bits of a chain reaction machine together is fraught with difficulty. It’s typically the links that fail, and that can lead to frustration when it’s not clear who ‘owns’ the connection.
  2. There’s a tendency for everything to start high and finish low, and hence for each stage to run out of energy somewhat.

One of the things we’ve been playing with attempts to solve both problems, by chucking a bit of electronics into the mix. We use Arduinos as control circuits, running some code which is fairly readily tweaked to handle one of a range of inputs, including:

  • Straightforward ‘short to ground’ switches
  • Light-dependent resistors
  • Force- and flex-sensitive resistors
  • IR distance sensors
  • Tilt switches
  • Hall Effect magnetic field switches

The software is configurable into a couple of different modes, but is typically set to trigger on a threshold reading and operate either a servo, or a continuous-rotation servo as a low-speed motor.

The resulting chain reaction machines integrate physical and electronic segments, and splicing them together is hence usually a case of running longer wires from a sensor at the end of one segment into the Arduino which controls the trigger for the next. Last week we ran an end-of-term workshop with 15 year-olds from one of our partner schools, who came up with the machines you see in these two films. We think they did a cracking job.

Now, we don’t use this workshop very often. The challenge, we find, is that there are so many alien pieces of technology that participants tend to freeze rather than try things out and explore. These groups worked particularly well, but more generally we (unexpectedly?) find this to be a better workshop with primary groups than secondary. Younger children tend to be more receptive to (or familiar with?) failure and iterative development.

However, when the workshop comes together it can produce some outstanding results. We think there’s some mileage in the approach, and we’ll continue to refine the idea.

The code we’re using is on Github, I’m afraid with rather minimal documentation at present. I’ll try to include part details for the sensors, but the code comments should walk you through most of it.

Physics Summer Schools

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In my previous job, I used to be part of a team that ran teacher summer schools for the Institute of Physics.  These were aimed at teachers who were not specialist teachers of physics, but who had to teach physics.  They were held in Oxford, Cambridge and York (which was my course).  The summer schools were fantastic, with workshops on different physics topics, evening speakers, and excellent food!  Back then, the courses were only open to a fairly small cohort of schools that were part of the Stimulating Physics Network.

This year the Summer Schools are available to new or non-specialist teachers at ANY English school.  If you have some time over the summer, then I can highly recommend the courses – they are fantastic.  Also, there is no cost to the teacher – the IOP pays for it all.IMAG0054

 

 

 

Full details from the IOP are given below:

Summer Schools are now open to all new and non-specialists teachers of physics in English secondary schools. Register to reserve your place at:

  • York Summer School: National Science Learning Centre, 25 – 28 July
  • Oxford Summer School: Keble College, 8 -11 August
  • Cambridge Summer School: Homerton College, 8 – 11 August

Each school consists of four days of intensive hands-on workshops led by our Teaching and Learning Coaches. The Summer Schools focus on developing both subject knowledge and pedagogy. Our initial (First Year) programme covers core topics such as electricity, energy and forces. Our advanced (Second Year) programme builds on the initial course and introduces radioactivity, momentum and waves.

All costs of attending the summer schools are covered by the Stimulating Physics Network.

Register to:

  • broaden your understanding of physics
  • enjoy the subject more;
  • feel more confident about teaching physics; and
  • make physics even more interesting for your students.

Along with our intensive programme of workshops, discussions and masterclasses, the Summer Schools include food, accommodation and entertainment. You can follow the courses on twitter:

  • York Summer School: #SPNYork
  • Oxford Summer School: #SPNOxford
  • Cambridge Summer School: #SPNCam

For more information, please contact Mariana Salgueiro at 020 7470 4988.

 

This shape-changing visual effects car can… wait, what?

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Suppose you’re trying to make a car advert, you’re up against tight deadlines, but you don’t actually have the car you’re supposed to be filming. What do you do?

This sort of scenario is more common than you might think. Maybe the car hasn’t quite been built yet, or perhaps there are late design changes, or the manufacturer could be really paranoid about keeping it under wraps until the grand reveal. The advertising industry spends big money – huge money – and it expects this sort of problem to be solvable.

OK, so you head out to a test track or a desert road or whatever, and you film some other car driving around, then you do the whole special effects wizardry thing to paint a 3D model of the car your client wants over the car you actually filmed. So far so good. But your client isn’t happy, because nothing looks quite right. Dust isn’t being kicked up from precisely the right places, because the wheels aren’t right. And the 3D-composited car doesn’t reflect the world around in a way that’s convincing, because it wasn’t actually there. And it doesn’t move quite right, because you’ve had to guess at all the velocity vectors of the car you filmed.

One of the biggest special effects houses working on this sort of job is The Mill. You’ll have seen their work everywhere, without knowing it, and they’ve just revealed the most amazing solution to the filming-a-car-without-the-right-car problem, the Blackbird. Watch the video above, and be astounded.

Yet in some ways, it’s unsurprising. We’re used to character replacement in movies, where an actor performs in a green suit with motion-tracking dots painted all over them, then a graphical character is animated over them in post-production. The character can be larger, smaller, wider, have more legs, whatever you like. What the Mill have done is, effectively, the same thing but for a car.

The really neat parts are the integrated motion logging and the camera mounted on the roof. The camera seems a bit like the ones used for the cars which compile Google Maps – as the Blackbird drives around it records 360° images of the world around it. Video compositors can then use that data to work out what the reflections on the car’s bodywork would have been, had it been there in reality.

I love this sort of project. It’s plainly ridiculous, and yet it’s solving a very real problem with very real sums of money hinging on it. There’s a wealth of engineering, physics, maths, and computer science involved in pulling together a solution, and you have to get all of that right before you can even start to see finished results and judge whether it looks right.

When everything comes together, you’ve done the impossible, with the result that… nobody notices. And that’s the whole point.

There’s more about the Blackbird at the Mill’s website.

Go Ballistic! winners at Big Bang North East

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Phew! We’re slowly recovering from a couple of crazy days at the Big Bang North East. We spun patterns and collected hopes and dreams for future tech with the Technology Wishing Well; explored the universe with our space-themed show; and launched ping pong balls with hundreds of catapults in our Go Ballistic! workshop.

We had about 18 booked groups through the workshop, and managed to squeeze in a few more schools too. We’re sorry if we had to turn you away, we were crazily popular. Apart from anything else, there are no more decent plastic spoons to be had anywhere in central Newcastle. We bought (and used) them all!

So here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the grand reveal of the final standings on the leaderboard:

Click the image to see it larger, but here’s the leading portion of results of 4m and above:

  • Longest distance achieved: Royal Institution, 5.80m. However, see below!
  • Gosforth East Middle School (yr. 7): 5.00m (secondary winner!)
  • Academy 360 (yr. 8): 4.80m
  • Monkwearmouth (yr. 7), Washington (yr. 8): both 4.65m
  • Monkseaton Middle School (yr. 6), Bede Academy (6JRA): 4.40m (joint primary winners!)
  • Farringdon: 4.40m
  • Gosforth East Middle School (yr. 6): 4.30m
  • Heworth Grange: 4.10m
  • Southlands A: 4.00m
Emma King RI catapult

Dr. Emma J King of the Royal Institution with her redesigned catapult, which achieved a throw of 5.80m from a single elastic band.

Congratulations to the entrant from the Royal Institution in London, Emma J King, pictured left. Emma’s throw of 5.80m was the longest we saw on the day. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that her catapult design was dramatically different to anyone else’s, but you’ll also notice that Emma isn’t quite a school student. In fact she has a PhD in physics, and neither we nor she thought it was entirely fair to count her remarkable score against everyone else’s. Hence: she’s disqualified.

Our Secondary winners therefore remain Gosforth East Middle School (yr. 7), who landed a remarkable 5.00m to huge jubilation around the launching table. Academy 360 (yr. 8) were worthy runners-up, spending over an hour trying all manner of different approaches to eek out the next twenty centimetres they needed. Valiant determination!

Sterling performances also from Monkwearmouth yr. 7s and Washington yr. 8s, both groups with impressive bests of 4.65m.

Snapping at their heels were our joint Primary winners Monkseaton Middle School (yr. 6) and Bede Academy (class 6JRA), both at 4.40m.

We’ll be sending both primary and secondary winners suitable trophies, just as soon as they’ve emerged from our 3D printers.

Well done all, and our thanks for your enthusiasm and ideas. We had a blast running the workshop, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. One of my favourite moments was when a chap from the Army was standing nearby for a good half hour, watching a couple of groups develop, test, and iterate. I wandered over and invited him to make his own catapult. “Not a chance,” he said, “I wouldn’t get close to what this lot are doing, and I’d never live that down: I’m Royal Artillery.”

Wise man.

Study with us! PhD Studentship available

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Think Physics’ host institution Northumbria University has a PhD studentship available. Here’s the title:

Impact of Academic Research through Northumbria’s STEM outreach activities on the uptake of STEM disciplines by young people

I know, right? Snappy.

Importantly: there’s a full stipend available for this PhD, for three years at RCUK rates and fees.

There’s a full description of the project on offer at Find a PhD.com, and you can apply through that site too. At the time of writing this post the application deadline appears to be rather soon; that will be extended to later in July, so you’ve time to think it through.

Brain exercise for half term: P vs. NP

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If you’ve reached the stage of half-term where binge-watching iZombie, staring out of the window at the miserable weather, or playing yet another round of Overwatch just aren’t doing it for you, try this minor intellectual stimulation.

P vs. NP is one of the foundational problems in computer science, with a $1m bounty attached to the first correct solution. This film does a great job of setting out the problem in an understandable way, and exploring its implications.

P vs. NP is about whether every problem with a quickly verifiable solution can itself be solved quickly, which sounds like the sort of abstraction beloved only by mathematicians. But P vs. NP is related to a whole host of problems that would have very real implications if they turned out to be easier than we currently think. Encryption, for example. Or computational protein folding. And the film argues that this world of complexity problems describes not just problems in computing and mathematics, but complex problems throughout human experience.

Watch the film. Maybe get sucked into the rabbit hole of Wikipedia. But make sure you have something not too taxing to soothe your brain afterwards. Another round of Overwatch, perhaps?