https://artofproblemsolving.com/careers/job/6241787003_physics_curriculum_developer
The physics team at AoPS is building a comprehensive suite of courses to introduce students to physics. Our courses will let students explore both the content of physics and the ways physicists think as they build models. We have already built two core curriculum high school level courses and two contest courses, offered in our live online school.
The Physics Curriculum Developer will create engaging, thought-provoking educational materials that ignite curiosity and foster deep understanding of physics concepts. Whether you're an emerging talent or a seasoned expert, this role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on physics education. For candidates with extensive experience, we have the flexibility to hire at a Senior Curriculum Developer level.
The Physics Curriculum Developers will:
- Develop new courses and other educational materials in physics, creating original problems and puzzles that challenge and inspire students
- Improve existing materials based on student performance data, as well as student and teacher feedback
- Incorporate feedback from team members and other stakeholders into your materials
- Review and provide feedback on materials created by other team members
- Participate in the onboarding, training, and development of interns and entry-level curriculum developers
- Create labs that teach fundamentals of scientific practices, including model-building, communication, collaboration, data analysis, and experimental design.
- Collaborate with team members and potentially oversee work of junior developers (for senior-level candidates)
- Participate in teacher training and the creation of training materials, if relevant
- Interact with students through teaching in our online or in-person contexts.
- Foster a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning within the team
The ideal candidate has:
- Bachelor's degree in Physics or a closely related field strongly preferred, with an advanced degree being a plus
- 1-5 years of experience teaching physics and/or developing physics educational materials, ideally including experience at the K-12 level
- Strong physics content knowledge
- A deep understanding of how students approach, relate to, and learn scientific concepts
- Excellent writing skills, with the ability to translate complex physics concepts into clear, engaging, and understandable content
- Strong attention to detail and editing skills
- Strong creativity, with the ability to develop original problems and puzzles
- Readily seeks out and learns from feedback
- For senior-level candidates: Demonstrated ability to make good cost-benefit decisions and lead development of full courses
Students taking these courses will be challenged to
- Collaborate with peers throughout the learning process
- Build, test, and revise models for physical phenomena
- Use those models to solve creative and difficult problems
- Apply concepts they’ve learned to new contexts
- Balance and interleave the roles of intuition, empirical evidence, and mathematical analysis
Why Join AoPS:
This is a hybrid full-time position based at our headquarters in San Diego, CA. The full salary range for this position is $70k - $110k with a 4-6% year-end bonus depending on experience and level you are hired. Here are some things you can look forward to:
- Impact/Growth Opp: The opportunity to create the physics curriculum you wish you had as a kid to engage young minds in the field of science.
- Culture: Work and collaborate with an organization filled with builders and life-long learners who strive to discover, inspire, and train the great problem solvers of the next generation
- Flexibility: Casual work environment with a hybrid work week and flexible scheduling
- Benefits: Multiple options for Medical, Dental and Vision plans
- Future Planning: 401K with company match
- Quality of Life: PTO Plan and supportive leadership that gives you the work-life balance you deserve
- Ease of Transition: Relocation bonus (if currently located outside of San Diego)
Background Check:
Please note that employment is contingent on the successful completion of a background check.
About AoPS:
Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) is on a mission to discover, inspire, and train the great problem solvers of the next generation. Since 2003, we have trained hundreds of thousands of the country’s top students, including nearly all the members of the US International Math Olympiad team, through our online school, in-person academies, textbooks, and online learning systems. While our primary focus has been math for most of our history, through the years we have expanded our unique problem solving curriculum into more subjects, such as language arts, science, and computer science.
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Initial Curriculum Task
As a physics curriculum developer at Art of Problem Solving, you'll write almost every day. We're including this writing task in our application so you a chance to showcase the way you challenge and motivate students with physics problems. We're looking for problems that give students a chance to think deeply and build new ideas. Often, problems help students appreciate natural phenomena or devise solutions to challenges in other sciences or in everyday life.
Imagine that you are working on a course on electromagnetism for curious, motivated high school students with strong math skills. Below is a physics problem you read in a book. You would like to use the core idea of the problem in the course you're writing, but you need to make sure it serves your course goals. Adapt the problem however you like, solve your adapted problem, and explain your choices. Please return:
- Your new problem
- A complete solution to the new problem
- Your annotations, explaining anything you would like us to know about your submission. E.g. your goals for the problem, why you made the changes you did, assumptions you're making about the students' backgrounds, etc.
Feel free to use any format that you work well in to create your new problem. We will be looking for the broad pedagogical approach and general writing quality. If your rewrite needs images, for example, feel free to hand-draw simple versions, include them from other sources with attribution, or to describe in words what the images would show if you were to make them.
Problem: Suppose you connect a thin wire and a thick wire to a battery in series. Which wire gets hotter? What if you connect the wires in parallel?
