
Ask HN: Physics/engineering lessons for 14 year olds? - el_don_almighty
My 14yo niece is bored out of her skull under quarantine and I’m looking for resource material for daily lessons I can go through with her remotely in topics like physics, science, engineering, programming, etc...<p>She’s smart and creative, but her local school district was doing very little in the way good science before the COVID19 shutdown.  Now they are literally doing nothing for the next two months.  It’s silly.<p>I believe this is a great time for our community to reach out to these poor skulls full of mush and help them experience the joys of manipulating science<p>Any online resources for supporting our journey?<p>Need a mix of fundamentals, practical exploration and ‘lab’ experiments that scare parents<p>Especially since I can’t actually be there to help!
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Jugurtha
It depends on the individual. I spent the majority of my early teens
disassembling binaries and writing programs to patch software, reading virus
source code and trying to wrap my head around polymorphic viruses,
manipulating acid/base/oil to make soap and metals to produce gas and currents
and observe surface phenomena, distilling plants and flowers to make oils,
trying to understand programs to simulate forces on an airplane, lockpicking,
perfecting copper tube-lead-match firecrackers, making darts that fly go relly
far. Super, super fun, right? My nephews and nieces wouldn't do that if I
_paid_ them. This is mainly due to the fact that I don't know how to teach
them and I didn't invest time in learning how to connect with younger people.

I'm watching this thread for ideas. I'm considering "Physics for Everyone" by
Landau and Scratch for which I have an apprehension because why learn that
when I _know_ they're capable of learning to code directly, but maybe it would
help getting them hooked.

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precsim
Although not exactly a structured course or lessons, FEATool has been designed
to be a very easy to use toolbox for physics simulations and learning by
experimentation and trial and error with built-in tutorials (currently free
license for home use during the lockdowns [1]), for fluid flow and heat
transfer the simpler CFDTool might be more appropriate with an even simpler
interface that "hides" the underlying PDEs [2].

[1] [https://www.featool.com](https://www.featool.com) [2]
[https://www.cfdtool.com](https://www.cfdtool.com)

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montroser
Like half of my knowledge of physics comes from Mr. Wizard episodes from the
80s:

[https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Wizards-World-
Volume-1/dp/B00NL5PP...](https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Wizards-World-
Volume-1/dp/B00NL5PPW4)

They made a huge impression on me -- much more so than the classes I had in
high school where everyone was just expected to blindly memorize formulas and
no one understood any of the fundamentals.

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applecrazy
I would recommend looking at Mark Rober's channel[1]. He's a NASA engineer
turned YouTuber and does (weekly?) live lessons teaching kids physics through
experiments. It's really fun to watch (and his catalog of non-live videos are
good for kids too).

(I have no connection to this person, I just love what he's doing)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg)

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iends
Feynman's physics lectures: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/project/tuva-richar...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/project/tuva-richard-
feynman/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fapps%2Ftools%2Ftuva%2Findex.html#data=3%7Cd71e62e2-0b19-4d82-978b-9c0ea0cbc45f%7C%7C)

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enhdless
Get her started with an Arduino kit! And then follow tutorials on Adafruit,
SparkFun, Make: Magazine, etc. I always found circuit analysis to be a super
dry topic when taught in my high school and college classes, but it's fun when
you start out with the goal of building something. Depending on whether she's
more interested in physics/EE/programming, you can delve into one of those
areas more.

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Adlai
I was slightly younger than fourteen when my fifth-grade teacher staged a
bridge-building competition in the class. She priced the raw materials (mainly
toothpicks, glue, and string; I can't recall what the various exotic items
were), and graded us based on ineffables such as teamwork and empirical
metrics such as how much we spent on materials and how much weight the
completed bridge supported.

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davidajackson
You could ask her to build a trebuchet and explain why she built it the way
she did. There's lots of online resources for that and it doesn't have to be
too math heavy if she isn't yet studying F=ma, potential energy, kinetic
energy, etc.

And if she is far enough along to know/learn those things then they can be
applied to.

Hope this helps

