First-year physics tutoring

If first-year physics is not clicking

First-year physics is unusual because effort and results come apart. You can read the chapter twice, follow every example, and still stare at a problem set question with no idea what it wants. That is not a sign you are bad at physics. It is a sign the course is asking for something it rarely teaches explicitly: modelling a messy situation as an idealised one you can actually compute with.

Our founder holds a BSc in Astrophysics, so this material is home ground. What we work on with students is less "here is the formula" and more "here is how a physicist decides which formula the situation calls for" — because that decision is where the marks are.

What first-year physics covers

A mechanics course begins with kinematics in one and two dimensions, then Newton's laws and the analysis of forces — friction, tension, normal forces, and circular motion. It moves into the conservation laws, which are the real prize of the term: work and energy, then momentum and collisions. Rotational motion repeats the whole structure with angular quantities, torque and moment of inertia, and many courses close with oscillations, gravitation, or fluids.

The second term is typically electricity, magnetism and optics. It starts with electric charge and the electric field, then potential and potential energy, capacitance, current and DC circuits. Magnetism follows: magnetic fields, forces on moving charges and currents, and electromagnetic induction. Optics covers reflection and refraction, lenses and mirrors, and interference and diffraction as evidence of the wave nature of light. Enriched and honours streams cover the same physics with heavier use of calculus and vector methods, and often add special relativity or an introduction to modern physics.

Where students commonly get stuck

Free-body diagrams drawn carelessly. A large share of mechanics errors are decided before any algebra: a force included that is not there, a missing component, or axes chosen awkwardly for an inclined plane. We make the diagram non-negotiable and treat it as the actual answer to the first half of the problem.

Signs, vectors and coordinate choices. Students lose marks to direction, not physics — negative accelerations, components on a slope, and vector addition done as if the quantities were scalars.

Knowing when to use energy instead of forces. Many problems are brutal with Newton's laws and short with conservation of energy. Recognising which tool fits is a skill, and it is the single most useful thing we teach in the mechanics term.

Fields versus potentials. In the electricity term, students routinely conflate electric field with potential, and force with potential energy. One is a vector, one is a scalar; keeping them apart resolves a surprising amount of confusion at once.

Circuits beyond the simple cases. Series and parallel are fine until a network is neither, and Kirchhoff's rules require bookkeeping discipline more than insight.

Symbolic algebra before numbers. Students substitute values in line one and lose the ability to sanity-check their result. Working symbolically until the last step makes errors visible and units checkable.

How sessions work

Sessions are one-to-one and online over Zoom with an interactive whiteboard, which suits physics well — diagrams, vectors and circuits all need drawing, and both of us can draw. We work from your own problem sets, lecture notes and past exams.

Early on we usually slow you down deliberately: diagram, knowns, principle, equation, and only then numbers. It feels laborious for two sessions and then it becomes the thing that makes hard problems tractable. Closer to exams we switch to timed mixed sets so that recognising the problem type becomes fast.

Which institutions we support

We support students taking first-year physics at UBC and SFU, and we work with students at any institution, anywhere. Bring your course outline and materials and we will work from those.