Oblate Spheroid

I’d forgotten about this website from Rutgers – a collection of demos and experiments I’d used frequently my first time I teaching physics. My favorites are in the “Surprising data, puzzles, problems” section. Learning Cycles on Surprising data, puzzles, problems.

I had to take this test as part of an Early Career workshop I’ll be participating in in June. I think I’m going to give this to my students next time I teach Physics I. Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire.

UMD Physics Education Group’s redesigned website. Collections of good problems (particularly the Alternative Homework Assignments and the two sections of “Thinking Problems”), a set of open-ended problem-based labs, and demo worksheets. Context-rich problems from the University of Minnesota (see the “On-line archive”). MagnetLab at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at UF. Look at the [...]

New research, which may not shock professors, suggests that the reason students protest over their grades is that they associate good grades with simply performing tasks, not achieving particular levels of excellence. The New York Times today reports on a study that found that about one third of students expect B’s just for attending lectures, [...]

The wonderful website FactCheck recently ran a piece distinguishing between fallacies and logical fallacies. It contains a link to a nice set of examples of logical fallacies and “booby traps” – great material for anyone teaching students how to construct (or destroy) arguments. This is the kind of stuff everybody should know. If we teach [...]

I’ve been reworking some of my intro physics labs so that they are simpler and more straightforward. Personally, I feel pretty strongly that the two main types of physics lab activity – exploration and verification – are both important to a student’s education. I want to include more exploratory activities in my classes (perhaps instead [...]

I’m starting my third quarter physics course off with a few weeks on waves, so I was excited to find The Physics of Music and Musical Instruments, a neat online book by David R. Lapp of Tufts. It’s got some exercises and projects I think I’ll have my students do. Now, if only I could [...]

So, among other projects, I’m putting together a proposal to buy toys for physics demos. We have some simple ones already – nerf soccer balls, for example (one of which I want to cut up to install a wireless accelerometer… more on that later).  I’m making a wish list, and have decided on a few [...]

My evals came back from last quarter. I won’t tell you “how I did”, but I will tell you that neither I nor anyone I know takes the numerical evaluations very seriously, at least without a lot of context (how students usually feel about the class, what else is going on in the instructor’s academic [...]

I originally posted a list like this on Facebook. Here’s the full list of “cool stuff on the web” so far: Tracker – Free video-analysis software: http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/ High speed video collection: http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~dga/high_speed_video/ Cheap 3D laser scanning: http://www.instructables.com/id/EMWRPLGDH2EP285ZVG/ Fantastic Contraption – a physics related game: http://fantasticcontraption.com/ Along the same lines, Crayon Physics: http://www.crayonphysics.com/ High-speed still motion [...]