This section includes resources to help you facilitate the Challenge and provides a variety of enriching tools to integrate into your classroom instruction. Please take a look at the lesson plans, videos, reading passages, e-books, and more.
This is a collection of 223 open ended physics questions Kapitza used to use on the hard core russian version of the Q exam. Fun to work through once and a while. If you ever work through a question, be sure to send it my way, I'd love to see it.
I never let my students forget that pairing of difficulty with results, because I never forget it. I let them know they are engaged in a sacred task that connects them to millennia of human effort encoded in their genes. If they can fight their way to the truth, the truth will make them free, just as it did for me that day in high school physics.
To engage with the world in search of any kind of Truth is an expression of the search for excellence. That, by its very nature, is desperately difficult. There will always be a price to be paid in time, sweat and tears. We should never sugarcoat that reality.
We want to teach students more than just how to get jobs, we also want to teach them how to live with depth and for purposes that stretch beyond their own immediate interests. We should never forget that connection. If we do, we are in danger of losing more than just the next generation of science majors.