Latest articles on Physics, Chess, and Academic Excellence.
Ask a Sec 4 student, "What is the difference between a scientific theory and a scientific law?" and you will hear a very familiar answer: "A theory is not proven yet. A law is proven and never changes." It sounds sensible, and it is repeated in many notes and textbooks. But it is a common physics misconception, and it quietly hurts marks in O-Level Physics, H2 Physics, and IB Physics every year.
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biggest hidden reasons why O-Level physics students lose marks on explanation questions, and why many H2 Physics and IB Physics students struggle with the "big picture" of their subject. A large study in Greater London looked at this exact problem
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If you have ever asked a physics student "is scientific knowledge always true?" you probably got a confident, textbook-sounding answer. But here is the catch: high school physics students' personal epistemology often looks completely different once you watch what they actually do in the lab. A recent classroom-based case study followed nine eleventh-grade physics students for six weeks, and the findings say a lot about how science education practices shape the way young learners think about knowledge itself.
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A student teacher — someone who will one day stand in front of a classroom of 30 kids — can recite Newton's Laws from memory. They can write out the formula for pressure. They can tell you that heat conduction is responsible for why a metal spoon gets hot when you stir soup. But ask them why they chose a wooden spoon this morning, and the explanation suddenly falls apart.
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Here is something every physics teacher knows but rarely talks about openly: a student can correctly define electric current, recite Snell's law from memory, and still have absolutely no idea what is happening when a torch fails to light up.
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Have you ever finished a university physics course, passed the exam, and still felt like you had no idea how any of it connected to the course you took last semester? You are not alone. Millions of physics and engineering students around the world experience the same thing — and new research shows it is not their fault.
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Looking for the best physics tuition in Toa Payoh? Discover why Mr Chew physics tutor Singapore is the top choice for O-Level and A-Level students — MOE background, proven results, and a teaching style parents trust.
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If you've ever watched a science teacher explain why honey pours slowly or how a microwave heats food — and felt something was slightly off — you're not alone. A fascinating new study on everyday physics reasoning in student teachers reveals a surprising truth: future elementary and primary science teachers often get the right answer, but for completely the wrong reasons.
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When I was helping my younger cousin choose her O Level subject combination, she kept asking, "What's the point of physics? I'm not going to be an engineer." I didn't have a great answer then. But a few years later, watching her land an internship at a major hedge fund after reading Physics at NUS — I finally understood what most students in Singapore still don't
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Let me tell you about the most predictable conversation I have every year. A Sec 4 student arrives for their first session, usually sometime in Term 2 or Term 3. They hand me their latest class test. There's a pattern I've seen so many times I can almost guess the score before I look: solid marks on kinematics, reasonable marks on forces, and then — a cliff edge — somewhere around the electricity and magnetism section.
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AI is transforming opportunities for physics graduates across quantum computing, renewable energy, and data science — with demand for physicists who can work with machine learning and automated tools growing rapidly. Singapore is actively hiring quantum engineers, research scientists, and systems architects — with fresh graduate salaries starting at SGD $5,000+ per month. This is highly clickable for students wondering "why should I bother studying physics?"
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A Sec 4 student asked me something recently that I didn't expect. We had just finished a session on wave-particle duality — one of the newer additions to the H2 Physics syllabus — and she looked up from her notes and said: "Sir, this stuff about electrons behaving like waves... is this what quantum computers use?"
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Let me start with the headline that stopped my students mid-conversation last month. In July 2026, physicists at the CUNY Graduate Center published a paper in Nature describing something that sounds like it belongs in a science fiction film: they recreated the physics of extracting energy from a spinning black hole
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In 2026, quantum computing has gone from a niche physics research topic to front-page news — and the gap between what the headlines say and what students actually understand has never been wider.
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My younger cousin once made a bet with me at a family dinner. He put his hand in a bowl of ice water and said it felt colder than the glass of ice he'd just picked up — even though both were at 0°C.
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A Sec 3 student I know recently told me she didn't see the point of Newton's Laws. "When am I ever going to use inertia in real life?" she asked, scrolling through Instagram on her phone. I pointed at the phone in her hand.
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A University of Udine research programme shows how simple physical models — foam balls, stretched cloth, toy elevators — build real physics understanding where formulas alone fail. Here's what it means for effective physics coaching in Singapore. What do rubber foam balls, a stretched bedsheet, and a cardboard shirt box have to do with physics education? According to decades of research from the Physics Education Research Unit at the University of Udine, quite a lot. Their work shows that some of the most abstract and exam-troubling physics concepts — pressure, gravity, weightlessness, magnetic fields — become genuinely understandable when students can touch, build, and manipulate a physical model of the idea first. This has real implications for how physics coaching in Singapore should be designed for students who "know the formula" but can't picture what's actually happening.
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A university study found that most science-track students couldn't correctly draw how a torch works. Discover why "everyday" physics is so often misunderstood — and how the best physics coaching in Singapore closes this gap
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New research on teaching electric circuits shows why explaining and hands-on enacting beat passive learning — and how this shapes effective physics coaching in Singapore for secondary and JC students. Ask any secondary school or JC student to explain why a bulb lights up in a circuit, and you'll often get a confident but incorrect answer. Electric circuits are one of the most persistently misunderstood topics in physics — and a study from King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi shows exactly why, along with what actually works to fix it. The findings carry direct lessons for how physics coaching in Singapore should be structured for students who struggle with circuits, current, and voltage.
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Discover why students often know the "right" answer in physics but can't explain it scientifically — and how expert physics coaching in Singapore at MakePhysicsEasy.com bridges this gap for O Level, A Level, and IP physics students.
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If you've ever walked out of an O-Level Physics exam feeling like you knew the content — but still lost marks — you're not alone. I've spoken to dozens of Secondary 3 and 4 students in Singapore who said the same thing: "I studied, but I still didn't know what went wrong."
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now the latest digital transformation threat to many current jobs, disrupting many businesses as well as the workplace, causing major concerns among working professionals.
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The 2025 education research roundup highlights a shift toward balancing modern technology with time-tested developmental practices, notably through evidence that cell phone bans for nearly 17,000 students and a return to manual handwriting over typing significantly boost academic performance and literacy. While AI shows promise in reducing teacher administrative burdens—specifically in drafting IEPs of equal quality to human-written ones—it appears to sabotage student learning, as MIT researchers found that only 17% of AI-assisted writers could recall their own work compared to nearly 90% of independent writers. Furthermore, the studies emphasize the biological necessity of 90-second microbreaks every ten minutes and at least 45 minutes of daily recess (which reduced stress hormones by 68%) to sustain student focus and well-being. Ultimately, the data underscores that high-quality learning remains rooted in human elements: practice-based teacher training, resisting the urge to over-help struggling learners, and prioritizing trusting student-teacher relationships, which have been shown to improve overall achievement by 8.4 percentile points.
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Design thinking is a human-centered problem-solving approach that focuses on deeply understanding users, defining the right problems, and iteratively creating and testing solutions
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Dr. Jeff Bulington of the Franklin Chess Center in rural Mississippi opened the morning sessions by addressing a fundamental question: why should limited instructional time be devoted to chess? He examined the challenge of transfer—acknowledging that while chess skill is highly specific, when taught intentionally, chess can develop transferable skills in planning, decision-making, and strategic thinking. Bulington emphasized combining "chess in depth" with "chess in breadth," grounding programs in clear pedagogical purposes rather than claims of automatic cognitive transfer. A panel on the philosophy of games and learning explored how games cultivate curiosity, resilience, and experimentation. Dr. Troy Seagraves of Purdue University's Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence Lab discussed how games capture attention and foster task-oriented reasoning. FIDE Master Dr. Loren Schmidt of Heritage University examined feedback loops in chess, demonstrating how immediate response to moves—paired with a community that discusses and analyzes play—creates essential conditions for developing both chess skill and broader meaning-making systems.
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Flow in learning = the sweet-spot where skill and challenge are balanced so perfectly that the learner loses the sense of time, effort, and even self.
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Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion may seem theoretical, but they are deeply embedded in our everyday experiences. Whether you are walking, cycling, or playing sports, these laws explain how and why objects move.
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Physics is not just a subject confined to classrooms and laboratories—it is the foundation of nearly every modern technology we use today. From smartphones to satellites, the principles of physics silently power the world around us.
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