Students learn that charge movement through a circuit depends on the resistance and arrangement of the circuit components. In a hands-on activity, students build and investigate the characteristics of series circuits. In another activity, students design and build a flashlight.

Light up your love with paper circuits this Valentine’s Day—no soldering required! Create a sure-to-impress flashing birthday card or design a light-up Christmas card—all with paper circuits! In this activity, students are guided through the process to create simple paper circuitry using only copper tape, a coin cell battery, a light-emitting diode (LED) and small electronic components such as a LilyPad Button Board. Making light-up greeting cards with paper circuitry is great way to teach the basics of how circuits function while giving students an outlet to express their artistic creativity.

Students are presented with a short lesson on the Coulter principle—an electronic method to detect microscopic particles and determine their concentration in fluid. Depending on the focus of study, students can investigate the industrial and medical applications of particle detection, the physics of fluid flow and electric current through the apparatus, or the chemistry of the electrolytes used in the apparatus.

The People's Physics Book v3 is intended to be used as one small part of a multifaceted strategy to teach physics conceptually and mathematically

Explaining the photoelectric effect using wave-particle duality, the work function of a metal, and how to calculate the velocity of a photoelectron. Created by Jay.

Through a series of four lessons, students are introduced to many factors that affect the power output of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels. Factors such as the angle of the sun, panel temperature, specific circuit characteristics, and reflected radiation determine the efficiency of solar panels. These four lessons are paired with hands-on activities in which students design, build and test small photovoltaic systems. Students collect their own data, and examine different variables to determine their effects on the efficiency of PV panels to generate electrical power.

Course 8.022 is one of several second-term freshman physics courses offered at MIT. It is geared towards students who are looking for a thorough and challenging introduction to electricity and magnetism. Topics covered include: Electric and magnetic field and potential; introduction to special relativity; Maxwell’s equations, in both differential and integral form; and properties of dielectrics and magnetic materials. In addition to the theoretical subject matter, several experiments in electricity and magnetism are performed by the students in the laboratory.
Acknowledgments
Prof. Sciolla would like to acknowledge the contributions of MIT Professors Scott Hughes and Peter Fisher to the development of this course. She would also like to acknowledge that these course materials include contributions from past instructors, textbooks, and other members of the MIT Physics Department affiliated with course 8.022. Since the following works have evolved over a period of many years, no single source can be attributed.

Students learn about a fascinating electromechanical coupling called piezoelectricity that is being employed and researched around the world for varied purposes, often for creative energy harvesting methods. A PowerPoint(TM) presentation provides an explanation of piezoelectric materials at the atomic scale, and how this phenomenon converts mechanical energy to electrical energy. A range of applications, both tested and conceptual, are presented to engage students in the topic. Gaining this background understanding prepares students to conduct the associated hands-on activity in which they create their own small piezoelectric "generators."

Student teams measure voltage and current in order to determine the power output of a photovoltaic (PV) panel. They vary the resistance in a simple circuit connected to the panel to demonstrate the effects on voltage, current, and power output. After collecting data, they calculate power for each resistance setting, creating a graph of current vs. voltage, and indentifying the maximum power point.

Students learn how engineers design devices that use water to generate electricity by building model water turbines and measuring the resulting current produced in a motor. Student teams work through the engineering design process to build the turbines, analyze the performance of their turbines and make calculations to determine the most suitable locations to build dams.

Students learn how engineers harness the energy of the wind to produce power by following the engineering design process as they prototype two types of wind turbines and test to see which works best. Students also learn how engineers decide where to place wind turbines, and the advantages and disadvantages to using wind power compared to other non-renewable energy sources.

In this activity, students act as power engineers by specifying the power plants to build for a community. They are given a budget, an expected power demand from the community, and different power plant options with corresponding environmental effects. They can work through this scenario as a class or on their own.

This lesson provides students with an overview of the electric power industry in the United States. Students also become familiar with the environmental impacts associated with a variety of energy sources.

Students imagine they are stranded on an island and must create the brightest light possible with the meager supplies they have on hand in order to gain the attention of a rescue airplane. In small groups, students create circuits using items in their "survival kits" to create maximum voltage, measured with a multimeter and two LED lights. To complete the activity, students act as engineers by using the given materials to create circuits that produces the highest voltage and light up the most LED lights. They apply their knowledge of how voltage differs in a series circuit and a parallel circuit to design their solutions.

This class introduces students to the interdisciplinary nature of 21st-century engineering projects with three threads of learning: a technical toolkit, a social science toolkit, and a methodology for problem-based learning. Students encounter the social, political, economic, and technological challenges of engineering practice by participating in real engineering projects with faculty and industry; this semester’s major project focuses on the engineering and economics of solar cells. Student teams will create prototypes and mixed media reports with exercises in project planning, analysis, design, optimization, demonstration, reporting and team building.

Uncountable times every day with the merest flick of a finger each one of us calls on electricity to do our bidding. What would your life be like without electricity? Students begin learning about electricity with an introduction to the most basic unit in ordinary matter, the atom. Once the components of an atom are addressed and understood, students move into the world of electricity. First, they explore static electricity, followed by basic current electricity concepts such as voltage, resistance and open/closed circuits. Next, they learn about that wonderful can full of chemicals the battery. Students may get a "charge" as they discover the difference between a conductor and an insulator. The unit concludes with lessons investigating simple circuits arranged "in series" and "in parallel," including the benefits and unique features associated with each. Through numerous hands-on activities, students move cereal and foam using charged combs, use balloons to explore electricity and charge polarization, build and use electroscopes to evaluate objects' charge intensities, construct simple switches using various materials in circuits that light bulbs, build and use simple conductivity testers to evaluate materials and solutions, build and experiment with simple series and parallel circuits, design and build their own series circuit flashlight, and draw circuits using symbols.

This resource contains 95 multiple choice quiz questions inspired by Examples in the 12 chapters of University Physics Volume 2 Unit 2: Electricity and Magnetism. The quizzes have randomized numerical values, and can be printed out in two versions for students sitting side-by-side in a classroom. The current configuration creates 3-question quizzes. A study guide leads students to a practice quiz for each chapter. The number of questions in the study guide ranges from 4 to 11. The small number of questions in certain chapters does not imply that these chapters are less important -- not all examples make for good multiple choice test questions that involve numerical calculations. After this system has been field tested, more questions can be added where needed. Conceptual questions can also be added.

The selection of 3 questions from a given chapter was achieved by a random number generator. For this reason, the question selections might be less than ideal. These quizzes are not intended to have a large impact on the students' grade, but instead to encourage students to *read the textbook*. Also, since instructors know the contents of the quizzes in advance, they can compensate for idiosyncratic question selection as they prep students for the quiz.

The advantage of this system is that it is extremely convenient for instructors to use the browser's "print" option to print and distribute a quiz to the students. The disadvantage is that students and instructor have equal access to everything. Fortunately we can "hide the quizzes in plain sight". The current configuration provides 20 "renditions" of each quiz, and only the instructor knows which is selected.

The transparent nature of this unorthodox system has some advantages: Traditional methods of hiding the content of upcoming classroom exams are plagued by the fact that it is difficult to keep information secret. Instructors who use the same or similar exams for consecutive years will discover that students begin to exchange information with each other between semesters. An even more intractable problem is that testbank questions can be purchased on the internet. In this regard, the OER efforts might gain advantage over commercial ventures that sell text questions to instructors or students. The legitimate vendors (who sell to instructors) attempt to solve the "secrecy" problem by continuously modifying the textbooks, exams, and other ancillary materials. While all this ensures future revenues for the vendors, it also perpetuates costs for students.

In contrast, there is no need to modify an OER textbook by artificially creating a "new" edition. In fact, it is my experience that OER are created at a painfully slow pace, so it is unlikely that OER materials could evolve even if we wanted them to. This relatively "static" nature of OER textbooks suggests that the exams and homework problems be also "static". Instead of asking students to solve a homework problem at home, they should be quizzed on their ability to solve a problem whose solution is readily available online. Unfortunately all this tends to reduce the quality of lessons to that of rote memorization. So instead of finding interesting homework problems for which there is not solution available on the internet, we should task students with creating new homework problems and test questions. Those with less ability can be tasked with improving the posted solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Broadcast radio waves from KPhET. Wiggle the transmitter electron manually or have it oscillate automatically. Display the field as a curve or vectors. The strip chart shows the electron positions at the transmitter and at the receiver.

Broadcast radio waves from KPhET. Wiggle the transmitter electron manually or have it oscillate automatically. Display the field as a curve or vectors. The strip chart shows the electron positions at the transmitter and at the receiver.