Welcome to Honors Physics!

Your Course

in a Nutshell

Hello physics students! My name is Kelly Hicks and I am very excited to be your physics teacher for the 2024-25 school year. This is my first year at St. Andrew’s. Prior to moving to St. Andrew’s, I taught at Germantown High School for 13 years. Before that, I was a mechanical engineer primarily working in the aerospace field.

As a physics student, you will study the laws that govern our physical world while considering matter, motion and energy. Through physics we learn more about the world around us and hopefully come to understand that there are specific principles that help explain the behavior of objects when forces are applied and also the nature of gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear force fields.

A calculator is required for this class. Every day.

Remember that all of your grades for assignments, quizzes, tests, etc. can be found in MySA. This website is just for you to access content for the course.

Your Course Content by Unit

Unit 1

Kinematics - Motion in One Dimension

Kinematics is all about learning

  • how objects move

  • how quickly objects move

  • which direction objects move.

    We will begin by learning some helpful formulas and how to apply them to find things like displacement, velocity and acceleration. Kinematics teaches us about the behavior of objects in free-fall and projectile motion.

Unit 3

Newton’s Laws

And now we welcome Isaac Newton to our classroom! Newton’s Laws of motion will broaden our understanding of how objects interact with each other and the forces that are involved.

Unit 2

Kinematics - Motion in Two Dimensions

  • Vectors

  • Projectile Motion

  • Video Analysis

Unit 4

This unit focuses on the ideas of work and energy. We will learn what physicists mean by “work.” and how work changes the energy of an object though the Work-Energy Theorem we will use the Law of Conservation of Energy to show how energy is always conserved in a system but can change forms.

Unit 7

Unit 5

BY THE END OF THIS UNIT, you should be able to:

-define momentum

-calculate momentum using mass and velocity

-understand the principle of conservation of momentum

-understand the difference between elastic and inelastic collisions

-analyze collisions using momentum conservation equations.

Unit 6

BY THE END OF THIS UNIT, you should be able to:

  • Identify scenarios involving uniform circular motion (UCM).

  • Calculate centripetal acceleration.

  • Explain the concept of centripetal force.

  • Calculate centripetal force.

  • Solve problems related to uniform circular motion.