Students THINK that the calculus is the hard part. No! The physics concepts are the hard part, and those are well covered by the AP Physics 1 you've been doing for years. Once they have the concepts, adding on calculus isn't a big stretch!
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I’ve heard the style of questions is generally more conceptual in AP 1 than C…would you say that’s accurate? And do you think it’s changed with this year’s redesign (if that’s possible to know)?
That's been historically accurate; however, C questions seem to have become more conceptual over the last decade. The new exam mandates the style of questions we'll see. C questions will always be more in-depth, with deeper mathematics... but C will also include in-depth conceptual questions.
The best way to get a feel for the difference is to look at the released exam questions in the respective CEDs. The math routines question will be very much more math-y in C than in 1, for example! I think the real difference is depth rather than math - deeper concepts require deeper math.
And either way, you're teaching students coming in with the same priors - i.e. none. So you gotta build up a conceptual foundation! Know what calculus to do and why before doing the calculus. (Most students in C can, in fact, do the calculus, but most can't *set up* the calculus to be done.)
To me, the difference between a student placed in C or 1 (or conceptual) as a first-year course isn't *what* they can learn, it's *how fast* they can learn it. They can do P1 fast - so then they can spend the rest of the year doing deeper physics.
I totally agree. Calc isn’t the hard part of AP C, and only about 15% of the exam. I taught both AP 1 and AP C for 4 years. In AP C, about 1/2 of our students were taking calc concurrently. I waited until the end of the force unit to add derivatives and integrals with force and motion.
The calc teachers at my school were great teachers and hated when the previous AP C teacher “taught” derivatives and integrals at the start of the year in a very procedural way. It messed up their inquiry-based approach. I coordinated with them to find out when kids learned specific skills in calc.
That's one of the reasons I love teaching regular/honors physics in high school using modeling. They learn all about kinematics and the relationship between the graphs of position, velocity, and acceleration, and then get a giant 'aha!' moment or two in calculus.
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