Fiona James Tutoring

19/02/2020

Curiosity and persistence are most definitely invaluable traits in STEM.

22/10/2019

we've been discussing relativity, and its application to GPS. Basically, time moves faster in space at the GPS satelites, than it does on Earth due to Earth's gravity warping the fabric of space-time. While the difference is small, approximately 38 microseconds, if we didn't account for it, our GPS satellites would be out by as much as 10km in one day!

Time dilation and Einstein’s theory of relativity go hand in hand. Albert Einstein is the most popular physicist, as he formulated the theory of relativity, ...

12/10/2019

we got out of the classroom and headed inland for some astronomy! We replicated Galileo's observations of the moons of Jupiter - a significant observation which helped give credit to the theory of a heliocentric solar system. We saw the magnificent rings of Saturn and took photographs of craters on the moon. During the day we took advantage of the open space and modeled the distance from the Sun of the planets up to Jupiter, which was the size of a ping pong ball, 167m away from a basketball sized Sun. Neptune would have been almost a kilometre away! We also modeled the expansion of our universe using balloons and elastic, discussing the difference between the light from far galaxies being red shifted because the space between the galaxies is expanding giving the galaxies a relative recession velocity, and the light from galaxies close to us blue shifted as they move through space towards us (and us towards them) due to the effects of gravity.

29/09/2019

This is definitely a nice little tip that will sometimes make calculating percentages in your head easier!

A useful math trick, which could have saved hours of our lives has gone viral, leaving a lot of people asking 'why the hell wasn't this taught in school?'

19/09/2019

My year 9 science class have just completed a unit on waves and electricity, so a lesson on lightning was a great contextual topic to wrap up the term. I loved this slow motion video showing the step leaders branching out as the air becomes ionised, until one finally connects with the Earth, creating a conductive pathway, allowing the cloud to discharge. It was great to link what we learned through our experiments with static electricity and electrical circuits to natural phenomena, and this topic also gave us the opportunity to revisit what we knew about light and sound waves and connect that to the flash of light and thunder!

I felt even the first one was a little quick.