If your student will enter eighth or ninth grade in the autumn, then it’s likely she will be enrolled in Algebra I in one of those grades or the other. Often students first encountering algebra find themselves abruptly thrown off stride by the change from a focus on numbers and arithmetic operations to relationships between quantities. Here’s a typical problem of the sort your student will likely see, along with an answer and explanation. This might help to provide a…
NASA announced Wednesday that the first photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope are expected to be released on July 12. Testing of the observatory has been underway since it arrived at one of the Sun-Earth system’s LaGrange points on January 24. “Our goals for Webb’s first images and data are both to showcase the telescope’s powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come,” Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer and Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute…
One of the subjects that can perplex high school chemistry students is periodic trends. This is the part of the course where you learn how to read the Periodic Table of the Elements. You know, the map that tells us about all the kinds of atoms in the universe. Now, you might say “I don’t like to read maps and, besides, who needs to do it when we’ve got smartphones?” But I’m here to tell you that learning this skill…
As high school students move into their physics courses, especially in AP Physics 1, they’re going to encounter problems involving the study of kinematics, or one-dimensional motion. One of the typical kinds of problems that an instructor may ask students to solve involves acceleration and the application of Newton’s Laws of Motion. Here’s an example. A 43.0 kg parachutist is moving straight downward with a speed of 4.00 meters per second. If the parachutist comes to rest after constantly accelerating…
For many chemistry students, solving stoichiometry problems is a headache. But it does not have to be that way. In this post, I’m going to show you a simple way to make your stoichiometry story a sunny one. What we are usually doing with these types of problems is converting some quantity of a substance, usually expressed in grams, to a different unit called a mole. Then we often go from the number of moles of that first substance to…