Conceptual Physics Alive! is now streaming freely

Great news, physics types! 

For your professional development, your classroom, or for your own delight, Paul Hewitt's classic CPAlive! lectures are gifted to you here for streaming or download. Enjoy! To learn more about Paul's latest (2023) "Conceptual Academy Physics" full high school program, visit ThePocketLab.com. Good Energy!

Conceptual Physics Alive! [A handy index page with links to episodes and question sets] 

Conceptual Physics Alive! Video episodes streaming freely at Conceptual Academy

Conceptual Physics Alive! Question sets at TPT

Big Links Pages

Really just an excuse for me to post a favorite shot from Brooks Falls, Katmai, Alaska a few years ago. Arctic Lynx.

In any case, I always found some utility in big pages of links for video series. Links to videos (where possible) and question sets. So I made some for video series in various content areas. Here's what I've got.

The Mechanical Universe [52 college episodes and 28 high school adaptations]

Conceptual Physics Alive! [34 Paul Hewitt lectures]

Cosmos

A Personal Voyage [Carl Sagan 1980: 13 episodes]

A Spacetime Odyssey [Neil deGrasse Tyson 2014: 13 episodes]

Possible Worlds [Neil deGrasse Tyson 2020: 13 episodes]

Chemistry

Chemistry: A Volatile History [Jim Al-Khalili: 3 episodes]

Hunting the Elements ... Beyond the Elements [David Pogue]

Chemistry: Challenges and Solutions [13 episodes]

The World of Chemistry [Roald Hoffmann: 26 episodes]

Earth Science and Environmental Science

How Earth Made Us | How the Earth Changed History [Iain Stewart: 5 episodes]

Earth Revealed: Introductory Geology [26 episodes]

The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science [13 episodes]

I'll keep these lynx links over in the bar on the right.

A Bundle of Phyz: FLUIDS

When the College Board added fluids to the AP Physics B exam, I felt like I needed to create a new unit from whole cloth. This bundle includes most of what I subsequently produced over the years.

We begin with pressure and its idiosyncrasies, addressed in a springboard (guided classroom discussion) and a job (independent homework). Next we dive into PhET's Density pool in our first sink-or-float lab activity, "Pool Cubes 1 - Density."

Conceptual Physics Alive's telling of fluids begins with "Liquids I," in which he demonstrates principles using Pascal's vases, among other things.

A Bundle of Phyz: ROTATION

The bundle opens with a guided classroom discussion on "A New Kind of Motion": rotation. It's fundamentally different from linear motion.

"A Question of Balance" is a PhET-fueled lab activity that sets and applies the conditions for balance using the Balancing Act sim. It's a nice precursor to an in-class, hands-on balanced torques lab.

"Torque" is a guided classroom discussion that builds toward an equation for torque by examining various factors one at a time.

A Bundle of Phyz: HEAT + THERMO

The bundle opens with a virtual demonstration of thermoscopes and a discussion of temperature scales. Next we have the classic ball and ring thermal expansion demonstration guide, followed by a demonstration to see the difference between hot and cold in a couple of ways.

The Mechanical Universe's "Temperature and the Gas Laws" is up next, followed by Conceptual Physics Alive's "Heat, Temperature, and Expansion".

A Bundle of Phyz: ENERGY

This busy bundle opens with springboards introducing gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy. The Mechanical Universe's episode on "Potential Energy" includes a nice historical perspective via Roger Boscovich. Ranking tasks for potential energy and kinetic energy close out the mechanical energy introductions.

Next up is an exercise in tracking energy transformations. In the Before Times, students drew their own sketches. In remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL) that became impractical. In class, I followed this lesson with a showing of the classic Honda Cog ad. Two minutes of energy transformations, with some nice unstable equilibrium configurations, to boot. No CGI, and it only required a bit more than 600 attempts to nail it. OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" video presents even more shining examples.

A Bundle of Phyz: MOMENTUM

The bundle opens with the springboard (guided classroom discussion with presentation) that introduces momentum.

Next we have the "Take a Flying Leap" springboard, an exploration of impulse that ends with me jumping off the historic Victoria Falls Bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Kinetic Karnival of Jearl Walker then takes us through stories and demonstrations of "Forces & Collisions". Jearl chops through concrete bricks with his bare hands and survives a cinder block being smashed on his chest while sandwiched between two beds of nails.

A Bundle of Phyz: GRAVITY

The bundle opens with The Mechanical Universe's "Kepler's Three Laws" which set the stage for Newton's work on universal gravitation.

"Be Newton for a Day" retraces Newton's fabled derivation of F=GMm/R^2 from geometry, Kepler's Rule, and a few insights of his own.

"The Apple and the Moon" is The Mechanical Universe's telling of how Newton derived and mathematically proved his inverse square law.

"The Laws of Attraction" is a PhET-fueled investigation deeper into the mathematical relationships in universal gravitation.

A Bundle of Phyz: FORCES

The bundle opens with a PhET-fueled simulation lab activity that I used as a precursor to an in-class, hands-on experiment involving carts and motion tracking (not included here).

Next we have an in-class (in-Zoom?) direct instruction activity fleshing out Newton's Second Law via a series of fanciful shopping cart races.

Paul Hewitt offers instruction in Conceptual Physics Alive's "Newton's Second Law".

The bundle is a bit weak in Third Law curriculum. That topic is best taught via hands-on activities. But we do have Hewitt's "Newton's Third Law" and The Mechanical Universe's "Newton's Laws".

A Bundle of Phyz: INERTIA

[Update 3/10/22: Added Newton's First Law Springboard.]

This bundle opens with an activity that was conducted as a lab but was repurposed as a demonstration during remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL). It's a station exploration of "Inertia in Action".

Next up is "Clever Dumbbell," a classic inertia demonstration that challenges intuition.

Another classic follows with "Cannonball," where a cannonball is dropped from the mast of a moving ship.

A Bundle of Phyz: MOTION

Motion may be the most overrated topic in introductory physics. It is often the first topic covered in the course, and in some courses, the pure study of kinematics can linger from August through September and deep into October. That struck me as excessive, but any physics course is largely the story as told by the instructor.

The bundle begins with perhaps the first Conceptual Physics Alive! lecture filmed, "Linear Motion". Groundwork is laid as terms are defined and examples are provided.

"Motivating the Moving Man" is a PhET-fueled sim lab that focuses on translating motion graphs into verbal descriptions and verbal descriptions into motion graphs.

A Bundle of Phyz: NUCLEAR PHYSICS

Segment 4 of Physics of the Universe (the NGSS Three-Course Model physics course) is all about nuclear physics. There are only six segments for the whole course, and one of them is nuclear. I don't know about you, but I know I wasn't going hard at nuclear physics in my regular physics course prior to Physics of the Universe.

The bundle opens with a question set for Conceptual Physics Alive's "Radioactivity," followed by a PhET-fueled fun activity, "Radioactive Speed Dating" for some quick radiometric dating practice. 

A Bundle of Phyz: ATOMIC PHYSICS

This bundle begins with Paul Hewitt's homage to atoms, followed by The Mechanical Universe episode, "The Atom." Different perspectives, indeed.

"The Photoelectric Effect" Lab Springboard utilizes a few videoclips and PhET's The Photoelectric Effect sim to introduce this surprising topic.

"Fantasia on the Photoelectric Effect" provides a mechanical model to help understand the phenomena.

For a more quantitative look into the photoelectric effect, "Shine a Light" uses PhET's Photoelectric Effect sim. Students collect data, calculate key quantities, and plot results.

A Bundle of Phyz: LIGHT AND COLOR

As fortune would have it, there are many Phyz things involving light and color.

The bundle opens with an encyclopedic "Tour of the Electromagnetic Spectrum," produced by NASA. Next up is a look at a 2008 viral ad campaign, "Cell Phone Popcorn". Popping corn with phones was an urban legend in the early days of smartphones. 

Next up is a colorful sequence. "Pixel Peeping" and "Fun With Colors" were originally written for in-person instruction, but modified into Virtual Labs for remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL). Conceptual Physics Alive's "Light and Color" follows nicely. Then a pair of color mixing YouTube Physics lessons explore cephalopod camouflage and the mystery of magenta. How much do you know about chromatophores?

A Bundle of Phyz: WAVES AND SOUND

Waves: it's difficult to communicate without them. I consider them to be fundamental to the study of physics. 

This collection opens with two PhET-fueled experience-builders, "Water Waves in an Electric Sink" and "High Quiet Low Loud". It continues with video lessons from Conceptual Physics Alive "Vibrations and Sound I" and "Vibrations and Sound II," with The Mechanical Universe episode, "Waves" in between. It ends with the BBC's somewhat metaphysical examination of waves and their intrinsic ephemeral nature, "The Secret Life of Waves".

A Bundle of Phyz: WAVES AND SOUND at Teachers Pay Teachers

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTROMAGNETISM

Upon posting the RT;DL Virtual Lab Experiments related to electromagnetism, I realized I had a bunch of resources on that topic. So I created a bundle to gather and discount them.

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTROMAGNETISM at Teachers Pay Teachers

The bundle includes the Virtuals: "Seeing Magnetic Fields," "Ørsted's Discovery," "Electric Magnetism," and "Magnetic Electricity," YouTube Skepticism: "Magnet Boys," The Mechanical Universe: "Magnetism," "Magnetic Fields," and "Electromagnetic Induction," Conceptual Physics Alive: "Magnetism and Electromagnetic Induction," NOVA's "Magnetic Storm," and BBC's Shock and Awe: Part 2. "The Age of Invention." All the resources in the bundle are available separately. And they're all print-friendly Google Docs files to accommodate whatever kind of teaching you're doing at the moment.

There's also a link to the activity I wrote for PhET's Faraday's Electromagnetic Lab. It's free on PhET's activities list for the sim as a PDF file.

This is a big bundle. As was the case in the electrostatics bundle, there were some resources that struck me as related to, but not central to introductory electromagnetism. I listed them in the product description for anyone keen to even dive deeper into this topic. 

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTRIC CIRCUITS

The bundle begins with The Mechanical Universe's "The Battery," since batteries often power the simple DC circuits we like in Physics.

Next it's the PhET-fueled "Batteries and Bulbs". Originally written as a hands-on lab activity, this version was redesigned for use in remote teaching/distance learning (RT;DL).

Conceptual Physics Alive's "Electric Circuits" is Paul Hewitt's take on the matter; The Mechanical Universe's "Electric Circuits" is David Goodstein's. Both are excellent.

Britain's Brainiac: Science Abuse serves up an engaging and offbeat take on electric circuits with humans acting as the resistors in "Electric Fence". Some will recognize host Richard Hammond from Top Gear, etc.

We return to the battery and update its story with David Pogue's PBS/NOVA episode, "Search for the Super Battery".

Then we have "Logic Gates," in which Boolean algebra is played out in circuit form as students design simple circuits with switches that will turn a bulb on under specific conditions. To prepare students for Boole and truth tables, a gentle pre-lab worksheet has them drawing up gate configurations that allow a cow access to a pasture under specific conditions.

Once students master the single pole single throw (STSP) switches of "Logic Gates," they might want to have a go at designing a three-way switch, which involves SPDT (single pole double throw) switches.

A Bundle of Phyz: ELECTRIC CIRCUITS at Teachers Pay Teachers

All resources are available separately. All are print-friendly Google Docs files on Google Drive. All include answer keys.

If the shorter High School Adaptations of The Mechanical Universe are more your style, then check out Set 6: Circuits and Magnetism.

If you didn't work Shock and Awe - Part 1: Spark into your electrostatics lessons, that episode still works well with electric circuits.