Digital Physics Textbook from Matfyz Now Available on FutureBooks

A new digital textbook from Matfyz helps secondary school students understand electricity and magnetism through everyday questions and experiments. From 24 August 2026, you can find it in the new MFF FutureBooks e-shop. It also gives teachers didactic support for planning their lessons.

The textbook Základy středoškolské fyziky: Elektřina a magnetismus (Fundamentals of Secondary School Physics: Electricity and Magnetism) is published by MatfyzPress, the publishing house of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. It was written by a team from the Department of Physics Education at MFF UK: Vojtěch Žák, Věra Koudelková and Petr Kolář. The authors drew on research findings and on many years of experience teaching at secondary schools. Practising teachers also helped refine it. It is the first published volume of a planned series.

From Questions and Experiments to Understanding

A key feature of the textbook is that it encourages students to ask their own questions and draws on everyday situations.

The textbook leads students to think for themselves. For most questions, students first try to answer on their own and can then compare their answer with the authors' solution. These thought-provoking questions build understanding step by step, from basic ones to more challenging ones. Interested readers will also find fun facts and a more advanced mathematical treatment.

Experiments with everyday equipment such as batteries, magnets, LEDs or a multimeter are an important part of the book. This lets students try out the phenomena they discuss for themselves.

Fifteen chapters take students from electrostatics and electric current, through magnetism and electromagnetic induction, to electricity in the home and electromagnetic waves. The text is also enlivened by profiles of leading scientists Peter Kúš and Jana Kalbáčová Vejpravová, introducing the very latest research.

Support for Teachers in Lesson Planning

The teacher's edition contains the full textbook plus didactic commentary for each chapter. In it, teachers will find the estimated time needed, a list of required equipment, deeper physics background (with references to other sources) and further related teaching ideas. This lets them plan their classroom work in detail in advance and prepare everything they need, especially for the experiments.

Price and How to Buy

For schools, there is a package of 15 student licences plus a free teacher's edition for a total of CZK 2,250. Individual students, parents or teachers can also buy the textbook. The more student licences you buy, the lower the price per licence:

After purchase, the school assigns licences to students by their email addresses in the admin interface. If you pay through the payment gateway, you get access immediately after payment. If you pay by bank transfer, you get access within five working days of the payment being credited. You will receive the tax invoice electronically.

Five Years of Access Including Updates

A licence gives access to the textbook for five years and includes free updates. Readers get corrections and new content without having to buy a new edition.

After signing in, you can read the textbook in a web browser on a computer, tablet or phone. You can also save it for offline reading in the FutureBooks environment. One licence can be used on several of your own devices, but on only one device at a time.

The textbook uses interactive features and is designed for use in a digital environment. Printing, copying and exporting outside the platform are not available.

The First Title on FutureBooks V3

This textbook is the first title published on FutureBooks V3, the new generation of the FutureBooks platform. Authors and editors can work on it together directly in the book, correcting or adding to the text as they go. Existing readers also get these changes.

The text adapts to the screen size, and readers' notes are kept even when the textbook is updated later. We describe more of the platform's features in the article: