Cowen Physics was created in 2014 to provide free physics resources for students and teachers. I have been making occasional revision videos for my students since 2012 and, following positive feedback from these students, decided to share my videos with a wider audience. In October 2014 I collaborated with other physics teachers to create worked video solutions for the Oxford Physics Aptitude Test (PAT). Despite only being uploaded a few days before the 2014 PAT exam, these videos were viewed hundreds of times by revising students. From this success, Cowen Physics was born.
Cowen Physics has been unashamedly inspired by the excellent Hegarty Maths, created by my colleague Colin Hegarty. I passionately believe that extra support should not be restricted to those students who can afford private tuition, so all content on Cowen Physics is (and will always be) 100% free.
All Cowen Physics videos are hosted on a dedicated YouTube channel, with videos arranged into playlists matched to specifications, topics and key stage. This website and its videos are still very much in their infancy, so please follow Cowen Physics on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in order to be the first to know about new videos. Also, please use the contact form on this website to suggest topics that you would like to see in future videos.
Cowen Physics is a trading name of Mega Seating Plan Ltd, registered as a company in England & Wales (registration number 10358390).
Rob Cowen
I am currently a teacher of physics at a sixth form college in Manchester. Prior to this, I have taught physics and design technology at an international school in the USA, and was Head of Physics at a large comprehensive school in London. In 2007 I graduated from Durham University with a master’s degree in Engineering, before beginning a career in building services design with global engineering consultancy Arup. After four years, I made the big decision to change careers entirely, becoming a science teacher via the Teach First programme.
As well as teaching and running extracurricular activities such as a robotics club and a high school radio station, I am also the founder of Mega Seating Plan: an app for saving teachers’ valuable time by automating the creation of classroom seating plans.
Interested in what sort of work engineering students and graduates do? Download some examples of my work as a Durham University student and an Arup engineer here:
- STAARR – a design for a solar powered water purifier for use in Rwanda (third year MEng design project)
- Monitoring a small scale wind turbine – a design for a system to allow online monitoring of a wind turbine via the internet (MEng final year project)
- A comparison of the life cycle cost and embodied energy of a building – a research project completed during my work as a building services design engineer