Information for teachers
This page contains electronic copies of the documents sent to teachers in all UK Schools this September. These files are available as PDF documents, to view them you must have the free Adobe Reader software installed on your computer. This software is available from www.adobe.com
Items available, click to download:
- BPhO Information Sheet for 2010/2011
- BPhO Paper 1 - Please email BPhO@physics.ox.ac.uk
- BPhO Paper 1 mark scheme - Please email BPhO@physics.ox.ac.uk
- BPhO Experimental Project 2011
- BPhO poster/leaflet
New: Sample BPhO questions for students can be found here. Solutions for the problems can be found here.
Problem solving workshops and training
Blue Coat School, Liverpool have taken part in the British
Physics Olympiad for a number of years. Physics teacher, Keith Caulkin,
discusses the papers in after-school workshops designed to develop his students' problem solving skills
in physics as well as train them for the competitions. Below is an account of the after-school workshop he runs for his GCSE students.
Training Sessions for the Physics
Challenge
What I have found helpful and interesting for the students is to have
a workshop after school for an hour. Usually there would be about thirty
students attending as we enter roughly forty to fifty students each year. I
give out a photocopy of a past multiple choice section and give them about
twenty minutes to work through the questions in pairs, or threes. Then I ask
different students for their answers and we discuss the correct answer and
the reason for incorrect answers, as a class activity.
After these I give
out photocopies of two long past questions and tell them to work through
them in their small groups. After about twenty minutes I ask various groups
to tell the class their answers and we discuss if they are correct,
processing each part of the long question in this manner.
While they are
trying to get the answers I am circulating, giving hints and seeing how they
are doing. With about thirty students the buzz of talking Physics and
debated ideas within the groups is quite amazing! They soon acquire a strong
appetite for the questions and confidence is engendered!
I also distribute
at the end my neatly written up solutions so that they can study and learn
how to put each step of working in and how to lay out their own answers.
With about three or four workshops during the weeks prior to the Challenge
the skills of the students increase markedly in tackling the novel questions
where they have to apply their physics' principles in unusual situations.
Keith Caulkin, [Blue Coat School, Liverpool]
