This week, as undergrads and high schoolers everywhere are plunging into the world of Introductory Physics, I wanted to share another great resource for learning this material. It’s a course on Udacity called Landmarks in Physics. Udacity features a free, easy-to-use interface for self-guided courses taught through a combination of YouTube videos, interactive quizzes, and forums.
According to the creator and teacher of this particular course:
The class is introductory. It covers trig, kinematics, Newton’s laws, work/energy/power, simple harmonic motion, a bit of electricity, and the last unit is a very brief intro to special relativity.
The material is covered in a fairly novel way… Each unit tackles some big problem from the history of physics: for example in the first unit we learn trig as we figure out how to calculate the circumference of the earth using only shadows and some geography knowledge.
So if you’re looking for a slightly more mathy approach than Pop Physics has to offer, I recommend giving this one a try.