New approaches in physics teachers ’ professional development courses designed for improvement of the students ’ experimental olympiad tasks solving skills

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of the teachers’ post graduate education required due to the need to teach school students to solve experimental Olympiad tasks, and discusses the diffculties that the teachers face with when preparing their students for experimental rounds of the physics Olympiads. The relevance of the problem consists in the following: today teachers face with the lack of information sources on the school experimental physics competitions. The article suggests a possible way to solve the problem - the organization of advanced training courses for physics teachers that include specially developed video materials. The choice of distance learning is grounded. The structural principles and the objectives supposed to be achieved through the developed post graduate courses for teachers are described. The main selection criterion used for choosing the experimental tasks to be included into the courses is clarity. The tasks are rich with bright ideas. In some cases the new training tasks are originally created for certain courses. Each individual lesson is devoted to cover a certain group of techniques and methods of solving tasks. The presented material is structured in a special way that allows the trainee to be able to understand the methodology of solving tasks given as examples. The article describes the required characteristics that the experimental setup should possess, and which steps the experiments include, along with the purpose and methods of image/svg+xml94 measurements. The feedback allows students to contact the teachers in order to be able to keep up with the coverage of every particular topic and regulate this process.