The first
part of the 12th season of School of Young physicists is over. This
has been a challenging year because of the Covid situation in Latvia. The
semester started with in-house sessions for the first time since 2020. We
started by tackling the scientific method. Something that is not talked about
often enough, especially in the times we are in now, that misinformation is
rampant, it is of utmost importance to be able to tell the difference between
what is true and what is misleading information. In this session we had guests
from Scepticafe, a group, which has been doing work on educating the public on
misinformation, critical thinking and debunking myths that people falsely believe
in. The second session was about statistics and its use in physics. We learned
about basic statistics and its use in physics, and delved deeper in error
analysis, an important part of physics that is usually not taught in high school.
However, after these sessions, with the covid situations going out of hand in
Latvia, we had to move online, and after student suggestions, we decided to
post monthly physics problem and a home experiment, more about that in the next article.
We look
forward to working with students and seeing them back in the House of Science,
a thing that we have missed immensely.
