TL;DR If you want a quick way to gauge whether or not students understand the concept of potential energy, you can ask them to explain the origin of The World’s Most Annoying Negative Sign. It is merely a consequence of the very definition of potential energy, which is almost never explained coherently. In all of […]
Read More The World’s Most Annoying Negative SignThis week was yet another partial week. Between weather and holidays, we’ve not yet had a full week of classes. Such is life I guess. This week, we looked at the electric field of a static particle and the electric field of a fixed dipole on the dipole’s axis and on the perpendicular bisector of the […]
Read More Matter & Interactions II, Week 2This week was supposed to begin on Monday, but we lost both Monday and Tuesday to snow and icy roads so this week was effectively just a two day week. On Wednesday, I demonstrated Jupyter notebooks and informed the class that effective this semester, we’re moving away from Classic VPython. From this point on, we […]
Read More Matter & Interactions II, Week 1Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week constituted our fall break so this class only met once this week. I had extended all of the past WebAssign problems set deadline to Thursday of this week (the one day we met) and yet some students still haven’t not done them. Guilt. Whatever. Since we only had […]
Read More Matter & Interactions I, Week 9