I’ve seen several physics teachers I admire speak highly of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (BTCM) so this summer I finally got around to reading it. While it is difficult to see how to implement the recommendations in a large (150+ students) lecture setting, I have been thinking about their relevance for recitation sections (~30 […]
Before the fall semester, Andrew Morison posted about making questions unGoogleable, Rhett Allain posted about student video assessments, and Francis Su shared some great reflection questions for exams. These are all awesome suggestions that I have used in different ways. I will try to not to repeat their ideas here. Below are some question types […]
Inspired by this, I put a question on my Physics 2 exam asking students to associate thermodynamics with a fictional character and to describe the characteristics that led to that association. I showed students some examples from the link above on the first day of class and told them that I would be asking this […]
Each semester when I look back my slides there are little gaps from days when I don’t use slides or fuzzy records about whether some things took one or two days. I’m continuing my weekly record of daily activities. Astronomy Lecture Looking at our first homework assignment, students are still struggling to assign map directions […]
Astronomy Lecture Students had worked on the Ecliptic tutorial over the weekend so we started Tuesday with some follow-up clicker questions and I asked for their responses on a few of the tutorial questions. Later that afternoon I found the Motions of the Sun simulation from Nebraska that helps illustrate the Sun’s motion along the […]
No classes on Monday due to Labor Day. Astronomy Lecture Students worked through the Motion tutorial over the weekend so we spent Tuesday discussing clicker questions related to the daily motion of stars through the sky and how to relate this motion to the Celestial Sphere. On Thursday we worked through the Seasonal Stars tutorial […]
Brain dump of what happened in the first week of this semester. Astronomy Lecture Started the first day by giving students 10 minutes to brainstorm in groups and come up with a list of topics they would like to discuss this semester. Their lists contained a variety of topics but by far the most common […]
We were talking about special relativity tonight in Physics 3 and we had a good discussion about relativistic mass. I wrote the expression m = m_0/Sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) and gave a hand waving argument for why we say that mass changes with velocity. A student then asked if mass *really* changes or if it’s just something we say to […]
Overall I think the Intro to Waves unit in Physics 3 went smoother this semester than last. Quick recap… What’s New The biggest changes are two tutorials that I wrote. We started on Day 1 with an Intro to Traveling Waves tutorial. My goal was to get students to think about units (the argument of […]
I asked the following question when discussing 2D kinematics in Physics 1 this semester: A ball is kicked with an initial speed of 32 m/s at an angle 40o above the horizontal. a) What are the x and y components of the ball’s velocity 1 second and 3 seconds after being kicked? b) How high […]
Reflections on Teaching and Learning 