Ah! The next semester has finally arrived. After a long winter break, the time has come to study, to examine new concepts, to tackle obstacles like online learning, and find solutions to make our lessons fruitful. In our Band 4 Physics classes, we had a delightful discussion on our new unit “Waves”.  

During this week, we learnt about the concepts of Oscillations and Simple Harmonic Motion. Notably, a ball bouncing up and down, a pendulum swinging, the movement of the hands of a clock are all examples of oscillations. In addition, simple harmonic motion deals with a periodic movement in which the acceleration is proportional to the displacement (the direction in which an object is moving) and in the opposite direction to the displacement. A wow moment in our learning was when we discovered that circular motion, a topic we studied in the last unit, is like simple harmonic motion! Therefore, as we gathered knowledge from mechanics and waves and merged them together, we created a strong and uniform understanding about the topic.  

A few students including me were curious about the applications of this phenomenon in real life, to which our teacher Mr. Abhishek Dubey expanding onto its relevance said, “most of the applied physics and engineering subjects like electric fields, propagation of sound waves, electromagnetic waves require the understanding of the basics”.  

This teaches us that the base level of any skill we learn is of utmost importance before learning about how it is applied. He also gave an example of sound engineers using oscillations to produce electronic music and sounds, which grabbed our attention and kept us engaged in the lesson.  

The lesson eventually ended with worksheets and homework for the coming weekend. Since we had engaged in a healthy class discussion and used our critical thinking skills and communication skills to grasp the concept, it was imperative to retain all that information using homework questions. Overall, the discussion in the class, the momentum and real-life applications broadened our horizon towards the scope of physics as a scientific discipline.  

Daman Seth, DP 1