Category Archives: teaching

Dealing with cheating

Posted on June 8, 2013 by

At the APS Distance Learning conference last weekend there was a session on dealing with cheating. We heard from Dave Pritchard from MIT and Gerd Kortemeyer from Michigan State. Both of them have run courses using online homework (the MSU … Continue reading →

Posted in glodal physics department, sbar, sbg, screencasting, teaching | 5 Comments

Core physics curriculum

Posted on June 4, 2013 by

This past weekend I attended the American Physical Society’s Physics Chairs Conference. It was great to meet so many physics edu/administrators. I got a lot of ideas I’m interested in kicking around at my institution, but this post is about … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, teaching | 21 Comments

Creating supplemental texts

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

I’m nearing the end of a semester where, for one class, there was no official text. That’s going decently well, though I’ll likely have more to say about that in another post. What I want to talk about here are … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, syllabus creation, teaching | 18 Comments

Planck challenge

Posted on April 5, 2013 by

I was giving an oral exam today in Modern Physics, and I was inspired to write this post. A student was up front doing this standard: “I can compare and contrast the Rayleigh Jeans and Planck approaches to Blackbody radiation.” … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, teaching | 2 Comments

Wait! It’s still interesting

Posted on March 22, 2013 by

A lot of the standards I have in my standards-based grading classes start with “I can do an interesting problem involving . . .” As a class we define “interesting” to mean lots of things, including that it hasn’t been … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, sbar, sbg, teaching | 6 Comments

Imaginary quantum physics

Posted on March 17, 2013 by

A couple of years ago I wrote about some things I was thinking about regarding the use of complex numbers in quantum mechanics. This past week I got to refer to that post to my Modern Physics students, and this … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, teaching | 1 Comment

Lagrange multipliers

Posted on March 3, 2013 by

This is a post that builds on my previous notes about the calculus of variations. This week I’m going to teach about modeling constraint forces using the Lagrangian approach, and I wanted to put these notes down for my current … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics, teaching | Leave a comment

Rubik’s cube test development

Posted on March 1, 2013 by

This week I was inspired by this intriguing post by my friend Ian Beatty. He talks about what it might be like to use a test-driven development process for teaching. Here’s the short version of what I got from that: … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, physics, physics problem db, teaching | 8 Comments

Good week

Posted on February 23, 2013 by

I really enjoyed teaching this past week, and I thought I should get down what happened to cheer me up for those weeks to come that might not go as well. Brachistochrone The calculus of variations stuff that I did … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, teaching | 1 Comment

Brachistochrone approach

Posted on February 17, 2013 by

Brachistochrone: The shape of the fastest slide between two points. The Brachistochrone problem is one of the first and most important examples of the calculus of variations. It’s nearly required in any Theoretical or Classical Mechanics class for physics majors. … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, teaching, Uncategorized | 7 Comments