Today my AP Physics 2 students whiteboarded electric force and field problems while I was gone at the Science Curriculum Team (SCT) meeting. The SCT is creating a new 6-12 science curriculum aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. My group within the SCT was focused on the curriculum for a junior-level physics course. We previously identified fields as the central concept of one of the units. However, we were struggling with how to present fields to a regular physics class in such a way as to have students appreciate the necessity of a field model. After much discussion, we finally arrived at a compelling question: when you lift an object, thereby transferring energy into the system, where is that energy stored?
##ngss ##whiteboarding ##representations