These activities demonstrate what air is like and where it is found. Students will understand that air can be compressed, has weight, and exerts force. Full description.

The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) homepage provides AAPT news; information on membership; announcements of meetings as well as highlights and abstracts of past meetings; online publications such as the American Journal of Physics, the Physics Teacher, and the Announcer magazine; links to other publications such as Physics Today; information on AAPT high school and college programs; ... Full description.

This classroom activity gives students a firsthand look at how the color of a surface influences its ability to reflect or absorb heat. The printable five-page handout includes a series of inquiry-based questions to get students thinking about what they already know about albedo. There are detailed experiment directions along with a worksheet that helps students use the experiment results to obtain ... Full description.

This lesson introduces students to gravity as a force and explores the role of gravity in falling. Elementary-school students typically do not understand gravity. They see the phenomenon of a falling body as natural with no need for further explanation. This lesson will help to correct misconceptions about gravity, such as thinking it is the air that exerts this force, or that the magnitude of the ... Full description.

Students working in pairs or in small groups will predict how to make a rainbow using the materials they are given, then compare the rainbows that they produce with other groups of students and identify and record the colors that they see. They should also draw diagrams that show how a prism separates the colors of light. Alternative methods to demonstrate the separation of white light into the color ... Full description.

This lesson explores the idea of the expanding universe through video, text and questions. Discussion includes the cosmological constant, a universal force that opposes gravity which Albert Einstein called his biggest blunder, rate of expansion of the universe and dark energy. This is a product of Teachers' Domain, an extensive library of free digital media resources produced by public television, ... Full description.

This resource from Glenbrook High School in Glenview, Illinois explains and illustrates the nature, properties and behaviors of waves. The unique nature of a standing wave is also introduced and explained. Each lesson resembles the type and extent of coverage given to that physics topic in class. The sub-lessons are accompanied by Check Your Understanding sections, providing an opportunity to assess ... Full description.

This set of four animated slides illustrates the Coriolis effect, a manifestation of one of Newton's laws which says that objects move in a straight line, in an "inertial" frame of reference, unless acted upon by a force. The slides use the analogy of a ball thrown on a rotating carousel. Full description.

In this activity students will discover that magnetism is the force produced by magnets which does all of the "holding" and that it is also a very important force in nature. This activity introduces the student to simple toy magnets to explore magnetic attraction to items which contain metal by using paper clips. Students will experience that a magnetic force is invisible and explore the magnets attracting ... Full description.

These lectures by Stephen Hawking are divided into physics colloquium lectures (where at least undergraduate knowledge of physics is assumed), and public lectures. The public lectures include: The Beginning of Time, The Nature of Space and Time, Space and Time Warps, Does God Play Dice, and Life in the Universe. The physics colloquium lectures include: Inflation: An Open and Shut Case; Gravitational ... Full description.