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Bright Minds. Physics Physics course pack
See it before you commit

Look inside the Physics pack.

No sign-up, no email required. Here is a real week, a real rubric, a real lab-notebook page, and a real demonstration — the actual materials, not a brochure. Every sample links to the full artifact it’s drawn from.

1 · A real week

One week, two days on the physics.

The course runs on a two-day pulse — about two hours a day, across roughly 32 weeks. Here is week one of Unit 1 — Kinematics: the student measures motion for real before a single equation is memorized.

Concept Day · ~2 hrs
Meet position, velocity, and acceleration as three distinct ideas — not synonyms. Work through why a car can slow down while still accelerating, and sketch the x–t, v–t, and a–t graphs for a cart rolling to a stop.
  • Motion graphs (x–t, v–t, a–t)
  • Sign & direction of acceleration
  • Reading: Galileo’s inclined planes
Experiment Day · ~2 hrs
Run a low-friction cart through photogates on the track. Capture clean, repeated timing data, then compare the acceleration you measure against the slope of your own velocity graph. The equations sit under the data, not before it.
  • Photogate timing technique
  • Repeat trials & average
  • Report data with uncertainty

See the full eight-unit course map →

2 · A real rubric

How “mastered” is actually judged.

Every skill is scored at one of three levels against a published bar — no points, no curve. Here is one criterion from the Kinematics rubric — lab technique: timing & motion capture — shown exactly the way a parent or guide reads it:

LevelWhat it looks like — “Capture clean motion data”
DevelopingRecords times sloppily and ignores reaction-time error — one hurried run, no sense of how far off it might be.
ProficientCollects usable data but does not repeat trials or average, so a single bad run can swing the whole result.
MasteryUses photogates or video analysis to capture clean, repeated data and reports it with an honest uncertainty — and can say which measurement limits the precision.

Browse all 11 rubrics → · How this becomes an A–F grade →

3 · A real lab-notebook page

The artifact a student builds, keeps, and defends.

The lab notebook isn’t busywork — it’s the primary record, kept in pen at the bench and defended out loud. Here is one real Experiment Day, every section kept live — note the struck-through timing slip and the honest sources of error.

Sept 22 Period of a pendulum vs. length
Question
Does a longer pendulum swing with a longer period?
Hypothesis
Yes — period grows with length (T ∝ √L), so quadrupling the length should roughly double the period.
Materials
String; steel bob; stopwatch; meter stick; protractor (release <10°).
Procedure
1. Set the length, release from ~8°. 2. Time 10 swings, divide by 10. 3. Repeat for each length. ↪ dropped one 20 cm trial — miscounted swings
Observations & data
Length (cm)Period (s)
200.90
401.27
601.55
801.80
Labeled sketch: the swing arc, small release angle marked.
Analysis
Period rose with length. Plotting T against √L gave a near-straight line — matching T ∝ √L. Going 20→80 cm (×4) roughly doubled T (0.90→1.80 s).
Conclusion
Longer pendulums have longer periods, and the period scales with the square root of length, not length itself.
Sources of error
Stopwatch reaction time; timing 10 swings instead of one shrinks that error. The release angle was kept small so the small-angle approximation holds.
A model entry. One Experiment Day, kept live at the bench — graded against seven habits and defended at year’s end.
  • Dated & titled entries
  • A testable question & hypothesis
  • Units on every number
  • Significant figures, honestly reported
  • Calculations shown, not just answers
  • Pen in real time — struck, not erased
  • Error analysis with direction & size

See the lab-notebook starter →

4 · A real demonstration

The moment that can’t be faked.

Three times a year, a student performs and defends a demonstration — standing with their own work and reasoning aloud while an adult asks unscripted follow-ups. In the timed prediction-and-test, they predict where a projectile lands from their own measurements, then run it live and account for the difference.

“Launch speed measured 3.1 m/s and the table is 0.92 m high, so it should land about 1.34 m out. It hit 1.28 m — the 6 cm short is air drag plus my release timing.”

A passing answer from the timed prediction-and-test defense — reasoning from real measurements and owning the error, not reciting a formula.

Read the demonstration rubric →

5 · What you’d print

The whole pack, ready for a binder.

Everything here is on the web to read — and every rubric, checklist, and guide also has a print-ready packet version, formatted 8.5×11 for a clipboard or a three-ring binder. You assemble the student’s binder from the pack itself; there’s nothing else to buy to hold it in your hands. We’ve put them all in binder order on one page: Assemble the Physics binder →

Seen enough to start?

The whole Physics pack is open to read and print. Open it and begin, or ask us a question first — a real person answers.