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Bright Minds. Physics Physics course pack
Bright Minds Course Pack · Grades 9–12

Physics, taught at the bench.

Eight units from kinematics to fluids — lab-led, mastery-based, and built to AP-level rigor. A student doesn't pass this course by recognizing the right equation. They pass it by demonstrating, in person, that they actually understand it — stopwatch in hand, cart on the track.

A physics lab on a quiet Saturday morning: a dynamics track with a low-friction cart and photogates, a clamped pendulum, slotted masses, a meter stick and stopwatch, and a lab notebook open to a motion graph.
About this course

A full year of physics, built around what happens in the lab.

Most physics courses are a textbook full of equations with a few demonstrations bolted on. This one is the reverse. Every week is built around a question you answer at the bench — with a track and a cart, a pendulum, a stopwatch, a pair of colliding gliders, a spring you stretch and measure — and the reading exists to support that work. That is what "lab-led, not textbook-led" means, and it is the single most important thing to understand about how this course runs.

The course is organized as a two-day rhythm: a Concept Day where the idea is introduced and worked through on paper, and an Experiment Day where it becomes physical — timed, plotted, measured — and gets written into a real lab notebook. Between the two days, the student works at home, and that gap is where retention actually consolidates.

Mastery is the progression rule. A student advances through a concept when they can reproduce, explain, and apply it — not when the calendar says so. "Not yet" is the honest, expected default; "mastered" is earned and demonstrated. The rubrics are the instrument that makes that judgment fair and repeatable.

The spine

Eight units, in the order they build.

The concept graph runs from how things move up to how forces play out in fluids. Each unit has its own mastery rubric; the full sequence, with the labs and the two-day rhythm, is on the course map.

  1. 01Kinematics & Motion
  2. 02Dynamics & Newton's Laws
  3. 03Circular Motion & Gravitation
  4. 04Energy & Work
  5. 05Momentum & Collisions
  6. 06Simple Harmonic Motion
  7. 07Torque & Rotational Motion
  8. 08Fluids & Pressure
What it looks like

A year at the bench, not behind a screen.

A low-friction cart on an aluminum dynamics track passing through a photogate timer, a string over an end pulley to a small hanging mass.
Experiment Day Cart on the track — time the motion, then predict the next run.
A student-built rig on a workbench: a ring stand and clamp holding a string and swinging mass set up to measure g, with a meter stick, protractor, and stopwatch.
Experiment Day The apparatus defense — build the rig, take the data, defend the result.
An open physics lab notebook spread with handwritten observations, a free-body diagram, a data table, and a position-versus-time graph.
At home The lab notebook — the record a student defends out loud.