Two problems keep coming up in staffrooms across the country: how quickly students lose interest in subjects they find abstract, and how little of what they cram before a test still stays with them a month later. Plenty of teenagers see physics as a wall of formulas to be memorized and then forgotten. At Cedarcrest Secondary School, one physics teacher set out to change that, which is why visitors are often surprised to walk past Elliot Rourke's room and find students building catapults, wiring small motors, and testing model bridges rather than copying equations from the board. Is it a physics class, or is it a workshop? The honest answer is that it is a bit of both. Mr. Rourke hit on an unusual way to tackle both problems at once: he wove hands-on building into his ordinary lessons.

The idea grew out of his own years at university. "I could recite the laws well enough to pass, but I never really felt what they meant," said Rourke. "Then I took a summer job repairing bicycles, and suddenly the theory came alive in my hands. Seeing a principle at work in a real machine fixed it in my mind, and my marks climbed." He brought the same approach into his classroom last year, and it lifted both his students' interest and their results. Although the teenagers were keen and their progress was plain to see, he ran into resistance from the principal, Marguerite Vance, who doubted that time spent building had any place in a physics course. "Tinkering is a fine hobby, but I assumed it would only pull students away from the real material," Vance admitted. It turns out her reaction is a common misconception.