James Charbonneau at UBC physics and astronomy.

Useful Teaching Documents

The link in the title goes to a page with some documents that you might find useful for teaching.

Teaching Awards

I recieved the 2022 Canadian Association of Physicists Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

I recieved the 2016 and 2021 Killam Teaching Award for Science.

I co-teach the physics portion of Science One at UBC. I'm also Associate Director of the program. Science One is a highly integrated, multidisciplinary first year science program with an enrolment capacity of about 70 students. It is single 25 credit course with 8 instructors from Biology, Chemistry, Math and Physics.

Phys 333 - Climate and Energy

This is a flexible upper-level distance education elective that takes a physicists perspective on many global issues. Reagardless of what side of the debate you fall on, my goal is to teach you how to back up your arguments with numbers rather than just words. The only prerequisites are first year physics and math.

Phys 118 - Electricity, Light, and Radiation

This is a first year physics course focusing on eletrocmagnetism with an introduction to nuclear physics. I used to teach this course in the Summer session, which goes by like a blur. The course is interested to teach because for many students it is their first introduction to truly abstract physics. Many of the topics discussed, such as fields and potentials, are hard to access with our intuition alone.

Phys 101 - Energy and Waves

This is a first year physics for life sciences course. The course starts with an introduction to fluids, then moves to simple harmonic motion, the mathematical description of waves, and then applications of waves with sound and light. It a fun course to teach beacause I get to make musical instrments and shoot lasers.

Phys 170 - Mechanics 1: Statics and Dynamics

This is a course for first year engineers. It's broken into two very different halves. The first, statics, has problems that include boards supported by hinges and ropes and stuff. The second part, dynamics, focuses on how things move and have to crazy problems that mix curvilinear coordinate systems. It's fun to teach because I get to use linear albegra and fun calculus in a first year course. Also, it's the first time many of the students encounter problems that require multiple pages to solve.