At the bottom of the post are some links to a student booklet for teaching part of the electricity content for AQA GCSE Physics / AQA GCSE Combined Science using the Coulomb Train Model.
I have believed for a long time that the electricity content is often ‘under-explained’ at GCSE: in other words, not all of the content is explicitly taught. I have deliberately have gone to the opposite extreme here — indeed, some teachers may feel that I have ‘over-explained’ too much of the content. However, the booklets are editable so feel free to adapt!
I think the booklet is suitable for teacher-led instruction as well as independent study — I would love to hear how your students have responded to it.
The animations will be ‘live’ for the Google Docs and MS Word versions, but will be frozen for the PDF version. They can be cut and pasted into Powerpoint or other teaching packages (but please note that in some versions of PPT, the animations will appear frozen until you go into presenter mode).
Please feel free to download, use and adapt as you see fit. It is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY-SA 4.0 (details here), so please flag if you see versions being sold on TES or similar websites.
The remaining content for AQA electricity will be released (fingers crossed) over the next couple of months.
Feedback and comments (hopefully mainly positive) always welcome….
- Electricity Episode 1 (Google Docs version): go to File > Make a copy for an editable version.
- Electricity Episode 1 (PDF)
- Electricity Episode 1 (Word)
“I have believed for a long time that the electricity content is often ‘under-explained’”
Agreed
I saw the same in T. Sherrington Teaching Science book.
And I still think the solution is more teaching about batteries.