Purpose:

My primary goal for this lab is to get you to implement the simplest model of your project ASAP. In the process I'm looking for you to start building a series of Jupyter notebooks that contain diagrams, analysis, plots, reflections, and actual coding. In these sorts of projects, when you are in the work world, you will be creating a digital notebook or journal of your investigations. Not all of what you do will be used in the final report but when it is time to write the final report you will have 90% of what you need already done.

Procedure:  

1) Start a notebook or two with some coherent naming system to contain all of your work. Every notebook should have a similar title cell with all of the relevant information to link it back to you (the researcher).

2) Take a number of cells to include all of the material that you submitted for your project proposal. This should include your musings about various complicating factors as well as a clear statement of what you believe is the most simple model of your project.

3) In the next group of cells I want to see a clear sketch that illustrates the setting you are addressing. In the sample notebook later in this lab you will see examples from my personal project last year. You should expect that you will need to redraw/rebuild this drawing as the project progresses but we all need a starting point. Somewhere in this group of cells is where you will begin collecting references to the numerical conditions of your project. Masses of important objects, distances, and other important information. Learn how to organize this information under headings or in individual cells along with hot links to web resources that you find so you don't have to find them again.

4) Implement your simplest model. This may be a simple projectile calculation or a Newton's 2nd Law calculation of acceleration based on forces. What ever it is set it up so you can change the conditions and quickly get a updated answer to the simple version of your problem. Any math that you code needs to be presented in a cell before your code using the LaTeX markdown language to render it beautifully -- I will be pushing you a little on production values here.

5) Finally, at the end of your notebook start a list of useful references and citations. I suspect there is a way to do a nice bibliography in Jupyter notebooks but I haven't had time to search for it yet.

Example:

Last year I set out to understand what a piece of toast does as it falls off the edge of a counter. Legend has it that toast always lands jelly side down and I have seen physics analyses that confirm it but the math level was out of our comfort zone for this class. In the LMS I will link the first Jupyter notebook I created to explore this phenomena in the Student Resources tab. The notebook is called Toast2.0.ipynb. You would be correct in assuming that Toast1.0 was a colossal mess and was abandoned which is why I am anxious for you to get past that stage. I hope that my notebook models all of what I have said up above and if not I will be updating it. For those of you exploring the rotational motion of an object you will find the physics in my Toast2.0 notebok relevant to your projects. Good luck.

Deliverables:

1) All of the above in pdf form submitted to the LMS.