Introduction:
This is the third term of the calculus level general physics course. We can keep doing what we've been doing and the evidence is that it will all work out pretty well. None the less I am motivated to try to broaden your skills in ways beyond the basic content of the class.. It will be no surprise to you to learn that when this physics stuff shows up years down the road (only the PH211 material is a major player for most of you this coming year) it will undoubtedly be in a different setting and as part of some more complex behavior. The challenge I feel as a teacher is how to create opportunities for you to learn to see the physics that is hidden in novel settings and tease out the parts that you already know about and extract the new ideas or behaviors.
To try and explore this critical thinking process I am hoping to move slowly but ask a lot of you in terms of applying your relatively recently acquired physics understanding to a range of new experiences. I am motivated in part by the ISLE model of physics learning developed by Eugenia Etkina at Rutgers. This model of learning begins by observing and articulating what you observe from a physics perspective. Like the physics we have explored in the past this begins with describing what we observe before we seek to explain why it does what it does. We will seek to connect observations to physics concepts which will hopefully lead to other concepts in our growing network of physics ideas.
After we feel like we can sucessfully describe what we observe then we can explore how things change in different settings and what dependencies there are. We will also begin to seek predictive explanations. This connection between description and explanation is the same one we explored with kinematics and dynamics. Kinematics describes how an object moves and dynamics provides explanations for why they move that way. Both are valuable and important.