Sixty ideas: supporting A-level physics teaching
Staff at the School of Physics and Astronomy have collaborated with filmmaker Brady Haran since 2009 to create the award-winning Sixty Symbols YouTube channel. In our quest to make informative and entertaining short videos about topics in physics and astronomy presented by active researchers in the field, we have rather overshot our initial goal of 60 and are now counting in the hundreds!
While the videos are designed to be accessible to a wide audience, we are delighted that many teachers use them as enrichment material to supplement physics teaching in school. To highlight some of the videos we think may be most useful, we have created the following specially curated collection. In some cases the topics mesh directly with the content of the UK A-level syllabus, while in others they provide interesting background descriptions that may help to place some of the ideas in a wider context.
In addition, the comprehensive index now allows you to search the entire Sixty Symbols opus to find e.g., all videos on your favourite element, favourite force, favourite physicist, favourite equation, or by your favourite presenter.
If you are a teacher who uses Sixty Symbols in the classroom, we would love to hear your feedback. Please send us a message from your official school email account to
ella.batchelor@nottingham.ac.uk describing how you make use of the videos, and we would be happy to send you a specially designed
large-scale poster for your school. The illustration spans the very smallest to the very largest scales in the Universe and was designed by Prof Mike Merrifield and Pete McPartlan, whose artwork features in many of our videos. By providing your contact details the UoN will retain your information in accordance with the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018. For further information on how we process personal data visit our
privacy notice.