Alberta Physics 30

Just as Physics 20 is probably the easiest class in high school, Physics 30 is probably the hardest. Many students who aced Physics 20 sign up for Physics 30 expecting a cakewalk, but the very first unit sets them up for a steep failure. Being a 30-level course, there's a Diploma Examination at the end of it. There's 4 units.

Impulse and Momentum

The first unit is quite short, and is, shall I say, "Physics 20" in difficulty. There's only 2 formulas and some vector drawings to solve, making students think this whole Physics 30 thing is going to be a breeze. The first unit is a whole lot of fun, yes, as I get to make problems where things go bump.

Electrical Forces

This unit is the first of the two "nasty" units. We talk about electric forces, electric fields, electrical charge, what all these things do, where they all come from, and it's all invisible. The math is not difficult, but the trigonometry can get a bit much. Most teacher teach this like it's a brand new thing, whereas I endeavor to make parallels with gravity we learned in Physics 20. The formulas are very closely related, and students seem to breathe a sigh of relief when I show them that.

Electromagnetic Radiation

This is the nasty unit. There are a lot of largely unrelated concepts all crammed into this one unit. We talk about the light spectrum, reflection on curved mirrors, refraction through straight interfaces, refraction through curved lenses, diffraction, electromotive force, the generator effect, and those dang hand rules. I think the hand rules are great myself, but if you use the wrong hand for the given problem (left hand vs right hand for positive vs negative charge), your answer will be travelling in the opposite direction. But if it's an induction problem, you might get away with using the incorrect hand, since induction works backwards and most students forget to flip the direction of their answer. Nasty unit, I tell ya.

Modern Physics

This unit is a mish-mash of things that have been discovered in the past century or so. Mass-energy equivalency, the photoelectric effect, photospectroscopy, elementary particles and radioactive decay. My absolute favourite part is the "mass defect" concept taught with radioactive decay. "You take these things separately, and they weigh something. Now you put them all together, and together they weigh less." "Huh?" "Yep, that's why it's called the mass defect. There's something wrong with it."