Overview

Graphic organizers that I made during my junior and senior year of high school while I was taking AP Physics. They follow Collegeboard’s physics curriculum and separated by units. Each unit has a fundamental part consisting of necessary vocab, then showcases every major concept with examples, cases, and scenarios. At the end of each unit are tips I found useful for problem-solving.

Purpose

These graphic organizers originally started out as a way to help my classmates, but it quickly became my own study tool as well. As physics became harder to learn, I continued breaking it down and structuring lecture notes in a way that would help me comprehend the material. It became my way for study for tests, as I was essentially teaching myself the material. It also forced me to reread all the notes in a detailed manner so that I could summarize and visualize onto the graphic organizer.

How it was made

Using Mac OS' screenshot preview editor

Using plain old Google Docs, everything was typed, formatted, and created to build the graphic organizer. For pictures, they were created by taking a screenshot of some white space, and created soley in MacOS’ screenshot preview editor. An extremely crude and naive approach in hindsight but still managed to get the information across.

Challenges

1. Handdrawing each picture
2. Consistency
3. Formatting

A recurring challenge within this project was the need to draw out every picture. More often than not, the physics scenarios we had gone over in class had no Google image representation without hours of scouring. This meant I had to create my own original drawings, in a digitized format. At the time, the easiest solution to me was simply using a screenshot preview editor

Being consistent was also difficult as I tried to make all the pages as uniform as possible. This was hard as this project was being worked on over the course of a year and Google Docs unfortunately doesn’t support CSS. With enough time and effort, I eventually ironed out some of the bigger formatting discrepancies and overall, I believe the consistentcy is at a level where most people wouldn’t mind.

Formatting on Google Docs was also a pain. A single page could only allow so much information as it had to be legible and the aligning of text and pictures don’t easily snap into a satisfying grid. Some of these drawbacks made it difficult to maintain consistency and formatting ultimately became a larger problem than actually studying the physics I was summarizing.

Impact

I presented my work to my high school physics teacher Mr. Khan, and to my surprise, he offered to audit the graphic organizer for correctness and overall coherence. I was thrilled to have my work be recognized and appreciated. An even greater surprise was a monetary trade for the rights to use this work in his teaching for the future. He said he planned to use my work (and Manim Animation) as an additional tool and resource to help future AP Physics students learn the concepts in the notoriously difficult subject.

For now, I’m placing these graphic organizers here for free in the hopes that it may reach someone who needs it.