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Re: Teaching Conceptual Physics







Abby asked:

> Some of you are teaching this course over a semester period,

> what do you do with the course?

Covering all of physics in this course makes no sense whatever.  The students won't be able to grasp or differentiate between the concepts.  It will be a dimly remembered blurr.  If your administrators really need all of physics covered let them give you two semesters, or better yet four.  The best you can do is cover some basics and then pick out something that your students will really be interested in. 

I taught this course to students at a former aeronautic institute, who were all interested in flight, so that is what I focused on: thrust, the fluid dynamics of lift and friction, buoyancy and space navigation. In the process I was able to slip in the inverse square law, the concept of conservation of energy, universal gravitation and the concept of a potential well.   I'm not sure how much they actually learned - I could do better now I'm sure - but I certainly had their attention and I learned a lot myself.  And we had fun, which is one of the points of a course like this.

Chris Horton



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