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Re: [Phys-l] Good Questions



this is similar to the exercise I introduced for Jeff at N. Salinas high. I supplied to ten pair of students a 100 dice. They threw them removing, say, only the ones and repeating. We then successively summed their results. It taught exponential decay and Poisson stats. It was especially interesting to see how the scatter decreased w/ the summing.

Do HS students still read such books as Gamow's One Two Three ... Infinity, wherein he discusses the drunkard's walk and the blu sky, or are they addicted to TV and text msgng?

bc, who also suggests (ed) the xpmtl approach to thought questions



John Denker wrote:

On 10/07/2006 09:55 PM, Cliff Parker wrote:


What is a contrail made from and why is it there?
How does siphoning work?
Why does it rain when we have low atmospheric pressure?
What causes the phases of the moon?
What causes the seasons?
Why can't I sit at the bottom of a pool and breath through a hose?
What causes the tides?


There is a pattern there of asking for explanations, and an
emphasis on a deductive approach.


To my taste, it might be worth broadening the effort to include
experimental approaches and/or phenomena where a deep, detailed
explanation is not immediately forthcoming.

As an example:

Suppose we carry out a 1D random walk experiment. We toss a coin
100 times. We have a "marker" whose y-position increases by one
for each head, and decreases by one for each tail.

QUESTION: After 100 tosses, what is the expected distance of the
marker from the origin?

Hint: The answer is not zero.
Most students guess zero.

You can have each student (or each team of 2 students) toss a
coin and record the outcome on graph paper. Specifically, pass
out graph paper, and have them plot y versus N, where N is the
number of tosses. Collect results from the ensemble of students,