No school Monday (Rosh Hashanah), first double blocks
Day 1
- Course mechanics: Groups.
Notetaker -- responsible for recording questions/problems we are trying to solve, the methods employed to solve them, and any results we get. Usually on computer
Manager -- makes sure everyone else is on task. Helps notetaker figure out what to write down
Whiteboarder -- sketches, quick data-recording, figuring stuff out
Everyone -- THINKING!!
The jobs are really important to getting things done. We'll practice a lot, and you'll get feedback on how well you are doing as a contributor to your group. Groups will change every 2 or 3 weeks, and the jobs will cycle within the group daily so you will all have a chance at each job in each group you are in.
- Course mechanics: Notes and Summaries
- More work with pendulums. You should by now know which manipulatable variables actually matter for determining the responding period, and which ones do not. So you should produce a sizable data set about the manipulatable variable(s) that do matter. You will be able to use this data set tomorrow (during our double block) during the "test": I will give you a target time period to shoot for, and you will have to alter the parameters of your pendulum to get the desired period within plus or minus 0.1 seconds. The team that reliably gets the closest to the desired period will win.
Day 2
(first double block)
- Course mechanics: Writing good summaries. We will open up some of your notes and summaries documents to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly.
- The Pendulum Test.
- Unit conversion.
Day 3
- Course mechanics: Writing good summaries
- How do we deal with multiple measurements of the same thing? Is there a fair way to quantify who did the best in the Pendulum Test? What are the experimental issues in the Pendulum Test? What techniques can we use to be as confident as possible in our results?
- Vocabulary: manipulated, responding, accuracy, precision, standard deviation, average, histogram, significant digits, extrapolation, interpolation, graph, uncertainty
- First quiz - on identifying experimental variables
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