Edna meets Mr. Chubbs at the Conceptual Physics Tournament

Will Keay, who teaches in Fairfax, Virginia, came to judge the Woodberry Forest Conceptual Physics Tournament last weekend.  His class pet, Mr. Chubbs, met my pet hippopotamus Edna.  They seemed to like each other.  

We've been doing the tournament as our 9th grade final exam for seven years now.  Feedback from students is universally positive.  They like that they don't sit for yet another two-hour written exam, of course - even though, to a person, they recognize that they work harder to prepare for the tournament than they do for any written exam.  

This year they particularly articulated how much they like the collaborative nature of their preparation.  They get to give presentations and argue about physics with their classmates during their nightly study period.  The process feels social!  It doesn't feel like studying!  Yet, everyone recognizes how much their understanding of their particular physics fight problems - and of physics in general - improves through this social process.

I pointed out that there's nothing stopping these 9th graders from doing similar practice for their history exam as if they were going to have "history fights".  This point met with very confused and skeptical faces.  

The other interesting piece of feedback this year was about the difficulty of the AP-style problems that we posed.  More students than ever said that, once they had dug into the problems for a day or two, they felt easy.  Really!  A couple of students even suggested tougher problems for the following year.  While this peaceful, easy feeling was engineered by design - familiarity over the three-week preparation period breeds comfort - the fact that college-level problems seemed straightforward to general-level 9th graders means the tournament is accomplishing its goal.  We want students to leave physics with a good experience, feeling challenged, but good about meeting the challenge of a difficult subject.  

And, of course, the end-of-year positivity is helped significantly by the invited tournament jurors.  The conceptual physics teachers help students prepare for the tournament, but we don't judge the tournament.  When we give feedback, that feedback is authentic.  "No, you don't *have* to redo your graph, of course not.  But the jurors are more likely to say 'the data points on the graph don't take up anywhere near half a page' than 'oh, I'll bet you spent ten minutes on that graph, you shouldn't have to spend ANOTHER ten minutes making the scale more reasonable.'"  It's always been true that I am the publisher, not the author, of my students' grades.  The large jury, from a pool external to our school, makes my role even more clear.