Day 160: Six Flags!

AP Physics C: Today was our annual trip to Six Flags New England. G forces, energy, and electromagnetic induction, oh my.

Day 156: Fractals and the Mandelbrot Set

AP Physics C: We watched the NOVA special Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension. There were a lot a parallels between what the mathematicians where saying and the themes in Arcadia. Mandelbrot is a main focus of the special, along with applications of fractals — from CGI special effects to antennas to fashion. Minds were blown.

As a bonus, we looked at select scenes from Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Again, Stoppard shows a knack for mixing science and humor:

College-Prep Physics: Students began work on WebAssign problems about waves.

Conceptual Physics: Students wrapped-up work on the bike light presentations.

Day 154: Chaos and Valentine’s Grouse

AP Physics C: We finished reading Arcadia and began exploring the (sometimes chaotic, sometimes predictable) behavior of a simple logistic equation for modeling animal populations. The handout is here: Valentine’s Grouse: An Exploration of Chaos in Populations. And you can explore it yourself using my version of the population program in GlowScript.

College-Prep Physics: Wrapped up the wave/buggy lab from yesterday. We determined the model for our data to be wavelength = speed / frequency.

Conceptual Physics: Students finished building/testing their bike circuits and began drawing and annotating their final circuit diagrams.

Day 143: Curly Electric Fields

AP Physics C: Today we started our discussion of Faraday’s Law. I used a great VPython program to illustrate how a steadily changing magnetic field produces as constant curly electric field. The light blue arrows show the solonoid’s magnetic field. The black arrow indicates the direction of the current in the solonoid. The dark blue arrows show the magnetic field through wire ring. The purple arrow shows the direction of the rate of change of the magnetic field through the ring. And the orange arrows show the non-coulomb curly electric field along the ring. This program, and lots more, are available in the instructor’s resources section of the Matter and Interactions website: http://matterandinteractions.org/Content/Materials/materials.html

College-Prep Physics: We did a formal recap of what we learned from the light intensity lab and gravitational force lab. Inverse square laws! Then students did some more WebAssign work on light and gravity.

Conceptual Physics: Students took a quiz on Chapter 13 (Generators and Diodes).

Day 142: How Many Loops?

AP Physics C: In preparing for a lab on Faraday’s Law, I found a whole bunch of old wire coils. But I don’t know how many loops of wire are in each coil. So I turned the lab into a two-parter and first had the students design an experiment to determine the number of loops in the coil. Students used magnetic field sensors, ammeters, and rulers to collect data. Looks like the class average will be around 350 loops.

College-Prep Physics: Students wrapped up their size of the sun lab from yesterday, worked on a WebAssign about light and gravity. And since it was sunny again, I set up the telescope with solar filter so we could look at sunspots live and in person.

Conceptual Physics: Discussed results from the virtual diode lab and reviewed for tomorrow’s quiz on Chapter 13.

BONUS: Our professional portfolios were due today. I did mine completely online using Evernote. It was really easy, especially with a smartphone. You can see it here: http://bit.ly/appr2013noschese

Day 39: Bowling

Prompt: Are bowling balls solid spheres?

AP students are using energy conservation to figure out the moment of inertia of a bowling ball…which should help them deduce if it’s solid or not.

Of course, they wanted to have a little fun for this video.

Day 36: Breaking the Energy Model

In AP, students are predicting the landing point of a ball rolling off the end of the ramp. They are about to all fail in their predictions as the ball will not even land on the paper. They approached the problem treating the ball as a point particle. We’ll use this failure of the model to introduce rotational energy and they’ll preform the task again next week with their revised model.

Day 19: Young’s Modulus of Regular and Jumbo Marshmallows

AP Physics C students determining if different sized marshmallows have the same value for Young’s Modulus.

Day 17: Stretching a Wire

In AP Physics C, we used this video from Bruce Sherwood to determine the “spring constanst of the atomic bonds” of the wire. Although the wire is brass, we assumed it was 100% copper so we could use the size of a copper atom that we determined yesterday. Tomorrow we’ll explore Young’s Modulus.

Day 9: Elevator Distances

In AP Physics C today, we rode the elevator while standing on a force plate. Using the force vs. time data, can you figure out the distance between the top and bottom floors? (Hint: Use the momentum principle.)