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Re: [Phys-L] physics with and/or without calculators



You might be horrified by the results.

I've taught General Education Physics courses for most of my 35 years here and give weekly quizzes on which calculators cannot be used (since prior to cell phones not everyone had one with them regularly and classes were as large as 80 students). OK...these are 'conceptual' as opposed to problem solving courses but we do have labs in which they have to do calculations and we do some basic calculations as part of the class itself.

A typical numerical question that I've included on quizzes might be

A power plant has an operating temperature of 400K and exhausts its waste heat to the environment at 300K. What is the Carnot efficiency of the plant?

Or for the above, for each 100 kWh of energy delivered to the customers, how much energy is released as waste heat at the power plant?

There are surprisingly a lot of difficulties seen with student solutions. Of course, some don't know the formula covered two days earlier, but others cannot do the basic arithmetic. Some who get as far as 100/400 can't correctly reduce that to .25!

There is another problem here. While you can try to argue that not using a calculator will help them 'think' more and become better problem solvers, that won't sway many. We used to be able to say--'You aren't always going to have a calculator handy, so being able to do some math by hand is really a useful tool.' Today however, the ALL have cell phones grafted to their bodies. [While I still only have a $10 Tracfone housed in my car for emergencies, I see the writing on the wall that will compel me to get at least a simple 'smart' phone soon--at least the Tracfone version!] So, practically speaking, they will always have the cell phone/calculator. Now can they use those tools to solve the kinds of problems being proposed here (which really aren't practical problems)?

If some of this about the issue of critical thinking in our courses, I really have a hard time imagining ANY science course, _almost_ any College course, that shouldn't have a healthy dose of critical thinking built in--even some fine-arts courses. Not sure how you even present a physics course, even a _purely_ conceptual one, without critical thinking mixed in. Of course, what we each consider 'critical thinking' might vary some! ;-)

rwt

[Who 'tongue in cheek' speculated several years ago about having the College shut down and ban all computers for a year so that students, faculty, and administrators could evaluate just how much time and effort the devices have actually been 'saving' us (not to mention paper)! I was met by a horrified cry from whatever administrator was present when I proposed this that it would now be absolutely impossible to run the College as all of the business applications had been computerized and no one could possibly do that stuff by hand. Point being that the computers, calculators, cell-phones are here to stay and maybe better to accept and adapt than try and fight.]

On 12/19/2013 08:35 AM, Anthony Lapinski wrote:
Over the years I have thought about teaching physics without a calculator.
I could
essentially make up math problems where the numbers would come out as
simple,
non-repeating decimals.



-- Richard Tarara
Professor of Physics Saint Mary's College
free Physics educational software at
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html