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Summer 2026A conceptual high-school physics course organized around NGSS physical science performance expectations. It is currently ~53% published, with the rest planned for release throughout summer 2026.
The course emphasizes phenomenon-based reasoning: students build models, analyze evidence, explain forces and interactions, track energy through systems, and connect waves and electromagnetic radiation to information technologies.
Use this path when the goal is NGSS-aligned physics understanding without turning the course into a traditional algebra-heavy mechanics sequence.
NGSS Physics Learning Outcomes
NGSS HS-PS2
Forces and Interactions
Students explain motion and interactions by defining systems, analyzing forces, and using evidence from data and models.
Newtonian forces
- Analyze data that supports Newton's second law relationship between net force, mass, and acceleration.
- Draw and revise force models that identify systems, interaction pairs, and the forces acting on an object.
- Use mathematical and graphical evidence at a conceptual high-school level rather than relying on advanced algebra.
Momentum and collisions
- Use conservation of momentum when the net external force on a system is zero.
- Explain collisions by comparing force, time, impulse, and momentum change.
- Evaluate design choices for reducing collision forces, such as increasing stopping time or spreading out energy transfer.
Fields and electromagnetic interactions
- Compare gravitational, electric, and magnetic interactions as forces that can act across distance.
- Use models to predict how changing distance or object properties changes interaction strength.
- Connect electric currents to magnetic fields and changing magnetic fields to induced currents.
NGSS HS-PS3
Energy
Students track energy in systems, explain transfer and conservation, and analyze examples of devices that transform energy.
Energy in systems
- Model energy as motion energy, stored energy from relative position, thermal energy, and energy crossing system boundaries.
- Use diagrams, graphs, and computational models to represent where energy is stored and where it moves.
- Explain how fields can store energy and transfer energy when objects interact.
Conservation and transfer
- Use conservation ideas to explain why energy totals stay consistent while forms and locations change.
- Analyze thermal transfer as a process that moves systems toward more uniform energy distribution.
- Connect work, heating, and radiation to energy flow across system boundaries.
- Analyze simple energy-conversion examples, such as a solar panel or a heat pump, without requiring a full design project.
NGSS HS-PS4
Waves and Electromagnetic Radiation
Students use wave models to explain radiation, information transfer, and interactions between waves and matter.
Wave properties
- Use wavelength, frequency, period, amplitude, and wave speed relationships to describe wave behavior.
- Represent waves with graphs, diagrams, and mathematical relationships.
- Use models to explain interference, diffraction, resonance, absorption, and other wave-matter interactions at an appropriate conceptual level.
Electromagnetic radiation and matter
- Evaluate when electromagnetic radiation is best modeled as a wave and when particle-like models are useful.
- Explain how different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation interact differently with matter.
- Use evidence to evaluate claims about radiation, materials, and safety.
Information transfer technologies
- Explain how wave behavior supports communication, imaging, and sensing technologies.
- Compare advantages and tradeoffs of digital transmission and storage.
- Communicate technical information about how devices use wave behavior to transmit, capture, or encode information.
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