̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Mark Warner

Website helps maths and physics school students work it out

pbh25 — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 14:07:43 +0000

School physics students and their teachers can now tackle an interactive library of problems designed to develop their physics and maths problem-solving skills, thanks to isaacphysics.org, the latest strand of the Rutherford School Physics Partnership.

An open online course, isaacphysics.org challenges participants to solve a series of physics and maths problems, each tailored to the individual’s skills and experience. Questions are supported by hints and tips from Cambridge physics staff and undergraduates. Isaac is a bespoke tool for teachers and their students as they transition from GCSE (Y11) through to Sixth Form (Y12 & 13) and on to university.

Registered students will be able to record their performance, save their question gameboards, and develop a personal portfolio of completed boards tailored to their progress.

Registered participants will be able to watch lectures from the ̽��ֱ��’s Cavendish Laboratory, to participate in group problem-solving sessions in a Google+ hangout and, as the site develops, collaborate in teams to solve problems together.

̽��ֱ��overall goal of the Rutherford School Physics Partnership is to show students what STEM at top universities is about and to make it more accessible to all, by supporting students as individual learners. Isaac introduces students to the different style of study they will need at university, engaging them in the intellectual challenge of university physics, maths and engineering.

“We want Isaac Physics to be particularly useful for students in schools that struggle to deliver specialist maths and physics teaching,” explains Professor Mark Warner, Co-Director of the Rutherford School Physics Partnership.

“Isaac Physics can be used as a stand-alone learning resource by students who want to improve their physics and maths skills, or by teachers looking to improve fluency and depth of understanding in their students.

“As the site develops, teachers will be able to set questions from the website for a whole class, and Isaac will mark the work and provide feedback to teachers and students.”

“Working in groups and analysing problems posed in words alone, through diagram sketching and the application of fundamental concepts, are skills that students need to develop in order to do well at university-level physics. In addition, students also need to learn how to cope when they don’t get the answer right first, or even second, time.”

said Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright, Co-Director of the Rutherford School Physics Project.

“These questions will require thought, but are achievable, and students will gain in confidence and the questions will become easier with practice. Students shouldn’t be put off if they need to use the hints to reach the answer.

“Even as professional physics researchers, we can find ourselves struggling to solve a problem, and getting it wrong at first. ̽��ֱ��challenge, and the satisfaction, comes from persevering, working the problem out, and getting it right in the end.”

New online resource will help schools and pupils build specialist maths and physics skills.

We want Isaac Physics to be particularly useful for students in schools that struggle to deliver specialist maths and physics teaching.

Professor Mark Warner, Co-Director of the Rutherford School Physics Partnership

More information:

̽��ֱ��site can be found at: https://isaacphysics.org/
Around 80,000 students take AS and A2 physics. Around 100,000 achieve A*-B in GCSE physics and have the potential to go on to AS physics.
isaacphysics.org, and the Rutherford Schools Physics Partnership, aims to smooth the transition between these stages and to encourage students to continue studying physics, maths and engineeringat more advanced levels, by developing student skills and confidence.
For students: Questions have associated concept sheets, graded hints and hint videos. There are challenge questions, and themed sets of questions. If students register, then their progress will be followed, levels and problems will be suggested to them, they will be contacted about events open to them and about new materials being made available.
For teachers: in the next phase of the project, registered teachers will be able to follow the progress of students in their school, suggest selected problem sets to them and have them marked by Isaac, with results returned automatically.

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Understanding the chain fountain - a problem-solving partnership

sjr90 — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 10:54:56 +0000

̽��ֱ��problem of the chain fountain was revealed by BBC Science presenter Steve Mould. 2.8 million people have watched his video demonstration of a chain appearing to defy gravity by first leaping out of a pot before falling to the ground.

Professor Mark Warner and Dr John Biggins have published the first formal explanation of the physics behind this puzzle in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Alongside this paper, the Rutherford Schools Physics Partnership has published a collection of problems which take sixth-form scientists from their AS knowledge to an explanation of the research problem. ̽��ֱ��collection is available on the RSPP on-line learning platform.

“This is a unique opportunity,” explained Professor Warner. “Because physics is such a linear subject, it normally takes years to build up to tackling a research problem like this one.”

“ ̽��ֱ��key insight into the chain fountain is that, if you pick a chain up from a table, as well as you pulling the chain into motion the table must also push. Only then can you get a fountain at all. ̽��ֱ��whole question of the rise relates to fundamentals of momentum conservation along with energy balance. It relates to a wide class of such problems in nature and in technology.”

“For the problem of the chain fountain, the Rutherford School Physics Partnership has been able to publish a collection of problems which, when worked through, will take young people from the simple statics of chains to the model which predicts how high the fountain should rise.”

“We hope that by showing how the problems studied at school relate to real academic challenges, young people will develop confidence in their ability to solve physics problems and be inspired to continue studying physics to a higher level.”

̽��ֱ��Rutherford School Physics Partnership is a project designed to offer support and extension activities in physics problem solving to teachers and students transitioning from GCSE (Y11), through to Sixth Form (Y12 & 13), through to university, by combining an on-line study tool with face-to-face events at partner schools and institutions across the UK.

“We will be looking to exploit the surprises that Steve Mould revealed in a much wider range of problems that we are working on,” added Dr Biggins.

“We hope that the young people taking part in the Rutherford Schools Physics Partnership will be working on them alongside us.”

Teachers are invited to join Professor Warner and Rutherford Physics Project colleagues for a free annual residential event which in 2014 will run from the 28th – 30th June 2014. To assist with supply cover costs, teachers from state schools may apply for a grant to cover the final Monday of the residential. For further information see http://www.rutherford-physics.org.uk/

For Y12 students there will also be a residential event in Cambridge as part of the Project from the 29th June – 3rd July 2014 and information can be found at http://www.rutherford-physics.org.uk/

A podcast in which Professor Warner and Dr Biggins explain the physics of the chain fountain is available here.

̽��ֱ��Rutherford School Physics Partnership is giving A-level physicists a unique opportunity to tackle a real research problem.

We hope that by showing how the problems studied at school relate to real academic challenges, young people will develop confidence in their ability to solve physics problems and be inspired to continue studying physics to a higher level.

Professor Mark Warner

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Royal Society announces new Fellows

ns480 — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:01:49 +0000

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society said: “Science impacts on most aspects of modern life, improving our understanding of the world and playing an increasing role as we grapple with problems such as feeding a growing global population and keeping an ageing home population healthy. These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society are among the world’s finest. They follow in the footsteps of luminaries such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and I am delighted to welcome them into our ranks.”

̽��ֱ��new Fellows are:

Professor Shankar Balasubramanian, Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Senior Group Leader, Cancer Research UK, Cambridge Research Institute and Fellow of Trinity College is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology.

Professor David Klenerman, Professor in Biophysical Chemistry and Director of Studies at Christ's College has developed and applied new general biophysical methods based on fluorescence and scanning probe microscopy to study important biomolecular complexes such as human telomerase, key biological processes such as protein folding/misfolding, and to image functionally the surface of the living cell at the level of individual protein complexes.

Professor Tony Kouzarides, Royal Society Napier Professor at the Gurdon Institute, is a world leader in the field of chromatin modification and its roles in transcriptional control and cancer. His finding in 1996 that the transcriptional co-activator CBP is a histone acetyltransferase was one of the key discoveries that started the modern era of chromatin research.

Professor Margaret Scott Robinson, Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, is the foremost expert on the adaptins, proteins which recruit transmembrane receptors to budding vesicles and play a key role in endocytosis and protein sorting. She identified and characterised the clathrin-associated adaptors AP-1 and AP-2, and provided crucial insights into how they recognise different membranes.

Professor Mark Warner, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory and Fellow of Corpus Christi is one of the founders of the field of Liquid Crystal Elastomers and has thereby predicted new phenomena hitherto unknown to classical elasticity, liquid crystals and rubber, for instance large thermo and opto-mechanical effects, liquid-like shape changes, mechano-chiral response and soft ferro-electric solids.

Professor Daniel Wolpert, Fellow of Trinity College is a world leader in the computational study of sensorimotor control and learning, transforming our understanding of how the brain controls movement. Combining theoretical and behavioural work, he has placed the field of sensorimotor control firmly within the probabilistic domain and shown how neural noise plays a pivotal role in determining both how we process information during action and how we generate actions.

Also honoured were:

Professor Gordon Dougan, Honorary Professor in the Vet School and Fellow of Wolfson College.

Hermann Hauser, Honorary Fellow of Hughes Hall and Honorary Fellow King's College

Six Cambridge researchers are among the 44 new Fellows announced by the Royal Society this week.

These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society are among the world’s finest. They follow in the footsteps of luminaries such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and I am delighted to welcome them into our ranks.

Sir Paul Nurse

̽��ֱ��Royal Society

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Yes