Alberta Physics 20

Physics 20 is one of my favourite classes to teach. The concepts are simple and the units are well balanced, both in terms of difficulty and amount of time. Basic algebra and trigonometry are essential, as I'll tell anybody who will listen: Physics is math with a story. Physics 20 is, in my opinion, the easiest science class in high school. If you are looking at taking something over the summer either online or through distance learning, I've had students complete the entire class in 2 weeks flat. There's 4 units.

Kinematics

Definitely my favourite unit to teach, as I get to make some fun problems involving cars on the highway and shooting canons from the top of a cliff (this unit is about things in motion). This unit is the one that leans very heavily on algebra. The student needs to be able to solve an equation for a variable, solve a quadratic and occasionally solve a system of equations. Part of this unit deals with vectors, and this leans heavily on basic trigonometry, but most important is to draw the triangles properly.

Dynamics

Another fun unit where I get to concoct situations where somebody, for some reason, would need to push or pull something uphills or downhills. There are a lot of individual concepts in this unit, but they are quite simple taken individually and they are all related (it's all about forces). I love cramming every single concept into a big nasty problem at the end of the unit to test students. The math in this unit is quite simple (there are only 2 formulas) and we do use a lot of trigonometry. We talk about tension, friction, gravity, pulleys and acceleration.

Circular Motion, Work and Energy

This is a unit of two halves: circular motion has almost nothing to do with work and energy. Work and energy are quite simple, as students have learned them in Science 10 already, Physics 20 only applies them to harder problems and throws a few new applications into the mix (like springs).

Circular motion is the one that sometimes gets to students. There's this thing called "centripital force." Teachers talk about centripital force in great depth, describe centripital force and what it does, even scribble out 2 completely different formulas for centripital force. Students can't help but think that centripital force is another force we need to add to the other ones seen in the second unit.

Except it isn't. The first thing I tell students in this part of the unit is that centripital force isn't a new force, it's a new job for all those other forces we talked about last unit. Then their eyes open wide and they wimper "Aaaah! That's why my teacher always keeps making centripital force equal to one of them other forces!" Yup, find which force is making you turn on a circle, that's your centripital force for this problem. Make them equal and solve for what you're looking for.

Waves

This is a weird unit. Some students love it and it's their best unit, others dislike it because it's more talk, less math. There's a bunch of concepts that are loosely connected, but it's mostly definitions and simple math. Topics include springs again, transverse waves, wave reflection, waves changing medium, resonance, musical instruments (sound is a wave), frequency, period, wavelength, wave speed and the Doppler effect.