first two tutorials

I have finished the first two tutorials that the students will use during recitations.Tutorials are an effective pedagogy small groups of students to work together and discuss questions that confront misconceptions. These group discussions are held in physics recitations of 20-30 students with a TA wandering around, facilitating where necessary.

The tutorials are ready for both electrostatics and electric fields. They are adapted from University of Maryland tutorials where the emphasis is on reconciling common sense and quantitative work

preparing the lectures

I have now prepared the first 6 lectures. It takes me approximately 4-6 hours for each lecture; this includes

• brainstorming
• reading the textbook
• searching for articles from the education literature about what students have most trouble with
  
• storyboarding the layout of the lectures, i.e. what the 14-16 powerpoint slides will each be about
• creating the clicker questions
• filling in each powerpoint

I enjoy the process, but worry about the rate at which I am getting them done. I wanted to be half-way through the course in prep by the start of semester, which would be 20-21 lectures finished

finished first four lectures

I have finished the first four lectures. One fascinating pointer I received was on student understanding of what happens when you put a conductor in an E-field. Many students think that the conductor "blocks" the E-field instead of analyzing it by superposition, i.e there are two sources of E-field, the first being the external field, the second being the field formed by the charges that are induced on the conductor. The total E-field is then zero inside, if it was finite the charges would still move

fun developing the Coulomb lab

I had a fun morning developing different ways to explore Coulomb's law, trying to find a way where students could get reasonable data on the 1/r^2 dependence. We eventually settled on the repulsion between the end of a charegd rod and a pithball on a thread. By suspending the ball just above graph paper you can get reasonable measurements of both the separation between the charged objects and the how far the pithball is deflected from the vertical.




For each separation the static equilibrium condition of no net torque gives you a measure of how the repiulsion depends on separation, the results were pretty close to 1/r^2 ! It was definiately fun futzing with alternative ways to create setups.

how do we know that there are just two types of charges

I'm planning to start the semester off by challenging the students with the question "how do we know that there are only two types of charges". May be useful to emphasize the nature of science, but also may go over with a thud, depending on whether students are already convinced that there are only two types of charges.

Note that it took from ~600 BC to 1800 AD, almost 2500 years, for humankind to reach the understanding that there are just two types of charges. And I plan to do this in ~30min!

different lab sections

When I teach 222 I enroll all my students from the registrar side into one webCT course. However each student is officially listed (on the registrar side) as being part of a separate recitation section and a separate lab section.

The lab sections meet once a week, each lab section at a different time per week and they have an quiz/assignment due just before the lab meets, this is a pre-lab. When I have all the lab-sections in the one-course, I can’t close the pre-lab till the very end of the week, after the very last section. I’d much rather close this at the right time for each section.

A possible solution is to create a) 222 webCT all_sections that everyone enrolls in b) then ~ 20 webCT courses: one for each lab-section that only has the lab info in it. Perhaps start with a template lab-section and clone it. Each student would be enrolled in the all_sections course and their lab-section. I would then perhaps create each pre-lab on respondus, upload each pre-lab to each of the webCT lab courses with different dates of each pre-lab, 14 of them in each of the 20 sections :( = 280 respondus uploads, yuck. Unless there is a smarter way to do that.

more open-ended labs

I have taken the opportunity in this past week to make more of our labs "open-ended". Rather than asking students to follow step-by-step procedures and hope they grasp the physics implications, part of the labs will ask the students to verify or test a physics principle.

For example in the magnetic field lab, they will be asked to establish the extent to which the approximations used in applying Ampere's law are accurate for a long wire and an solenoid. The plan is to have the first part of these labs follow some step-by-step examples to help students get familiar with the equipment.

Wonder what sort of evaluation I should do

draft sequence set!

I have now finished the first draft of the sequence and have been able to include a few more lectures that will focus on problem-solving: most probably via a guided problem. Now onto the labs

starting to plan for Spring 2009

I'm starting to plan for the new semester and am pretty excited about it. First priority is to figure out the number of lectures for the new material in 222, e-fields

All set?

Every thing seems to be set for the first lecture tomorrow: TAs have been given an intro, the lecture and demos are set, the first problem-sets are online, webCT course has been "released" to the students, the clicker infrastructure is set, and the first tutorial is almost ready.

As always before the first lecture I'm excited and nervous to meet the students...

text-book at book-store

Despite my best efforts to have a sig/note at the university bookstore that students could use Edition 11 or 12, apparently there is no indication to the students about this.... I'll try to track it down on Monday. I hope some students have not bought Ed 12 when they already had a copy of Ed 11.

supporting the TAs

I'm getting ready for a series of meetings with the new TAs. The TAs are in the best position to help students learn, so the more I can do to help the TAs, the better the course will go.

Key is trying to get the TAs to understand the big-goals of the course, building links between qualitative. and quantitative work and developing problem-solving skills. Crucial is for TAs to understand that students must explicitly struggle with these issues and TA role is to promote students resolving their own difficulties. Providing suggestions or direct help, will produce only short term gains

struggling with webCT

I'm testing all the components of the new webCT

1. the calendar tool does not automatically put an event for when problem-sets are due instead the calendar event is listed as when the problem-set starts. I posted a request for help to Ask Dr C, webCT's help board
2. the discussion boards were very cumbersome to setup for each recitation, hence I reverted to one discussion board per problem set
3. I was not able to find a way for the students to document they have done the pre-lab. To make sure these are not dropped from student's radar screens, I'm making them as compulsory as the labs to pass the course
   

revising lectures

It is now just a week away till the start of the course and I am beginning to go through a checklist of preparation. My goal is to have the material (lectures, problem sets, exams) prepared for a weeks ahead of when I will need them, so I can focus on the helping the students and the TAs.

Have now prepared the first 20 lectures, yeah! On Monday I will tryout the new webCT, clicker software, and review the first few problem sets