{"id":155,"date":"2009-09-17T16:32:15","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T04:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2009\/09\/17\/scholarship_physics_questions\/"},"modified":"2009-09-17T16:32:15","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T04:32:15","slug":"scholarship-physics-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2009\/09\/17\/scholarship-physics-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholarship physics questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just been putting together a presentation for final year school children on the NZ scholarship physics exam.&nbsp;&nbsp; NZ Scholarship is awarded&nbsp;to the top 3% or so of students in a particular subject in a particular year, and there is some big money up for grabs.<\/p>\n<p>But the exam questions for scholarship are hard.&nbsp; Really.&nbsp; I find them hard (remember I&nbsp;lecture physics at university &#8211; I should be able to do school physics stuff). &nbsp; I can open an exam paper and think &#8230;err&#8230;how on earth am I meant to do that? If that&#8217;s my response to a physics question, then I can only think that it will be the response of most people sitting the exam.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>But what makes the exam hard (generally) is that the physics problems come in unfamiliar contexts, with unfamiliar wrapping paper on them. There is an infamous question from a few years ago about phugoid oscillations on a model aircraft.&nbsp; What the phugoid are phugoid oscillations? I bet the percentage of the population who know that is small indeed. But, think more carefully, and&nbsp;one realises that phugoid oscillations (go look them up &#8211; I&#8217;m not going to explain) are just an example of an extremely broad class of motion in physics called simple harmonic motion. (Simple harmonic motion is what a swinging pendulum does &#8211; moves one way, then the other). Once the student realises this, the question is not so daunting after all.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s often true with real-life science problems too.&nbsp;Once we unpackage the problem, and get to the bottom of the issue, often we find that the science is not all that complicated.&nbsp;&nbsp;However, solving the problem might not necessarily be&nbsp;so easy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just been putting together a presentation for final year school children on the NZ scholarship physics exam.&nbsp;&nbsp; NZ Scholarship is awarded&nbsp;to the top 3% or so of students in a particular subject in a particular year, and there is some big money up for grabs. But the exam questions for scholarship are hard.&nbsp; Really.&nbsp; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,13],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Scholarship physics questions : Physics Stop<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2009\/09\/17\/scholarship-physics-questions\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scholarship physics questions : Physics Stop\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I&#8217;ve just been putting together a presentation for final year school children on the NZ scholarship physics exam.&nbsp;&nbsp; NZ Scholarship is awarded&nbsp;to the top 3% or so of students in a particular subject in a particular year, and there is some big money up for grabs. 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