Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Beichner's book



Hi all,

Well, here¹s the promised (threatened?) first request for ideas for my
textbook. People voted overwhelmingly to have this discussion on the list.
(But I¹ve decided to only put it on PhysL and not PhysLrnr. Many of the
folks reading the second list also read this one.) I¹m working on the first
few chapters and I¹m open to any and all
suggestions/comments/examples/criticisms/statements of unbelief, etc.

Chapter 0 will be a series of ³tools² and techniques that physics students
should find useful. Each section will stand alone--the idea being that
students would read the section relevant to a particular topic when they
needed to. At the moment I¹m thinking of things like:

*Units including SI, standards, and dimensional analysis
*Maybe Proportional reasoning (ala Arons¹ book)
*Scientific notation
*Vectors including components, adding/subtracting, and scalar & vector
products
*Graphing including curve fitting
*Trig definitions (only very basic stuff. In fact it might be handled in the
vectors section)*
*Calculus (also very basic stuff, perhaps handled in the graphing section)
*Computer tools, including search engines, spreadsheets, Euler¹s method, and
WebMathematica (which is supposed to be one of the ancillaries)
*Making measurements, including sig figs, accuracy & precision, and lots of
stuff on uncertainty
*Problem solving, including estimations, order of magnitude calculations,
and the GOAL problem solving approach (which is based on Polya¹s work).

Chapter 1 will be on describing motion. It is almost done. The idea is to
motivate the usual definitions of velocity and acceleration (treating them
in 3D‹thanks Aaron Titus) and handle all the problems from those definitions
(thanks John Mallinckrodt). There are a bunch of examples, including a
section on constant acceleration as a special case where the typical
kinematics equations show up during the solution of an example problem. It
is made very clear that these equations only work in a limited set of
conditions. (A lot of ³instruction² actually is relegated to the examples
since many students limit their reading to them.) There is also a section on
varying acceleration that has students use Euler¹s method in a spreadsheet
to examine the fall of a raindrop.

Chapter 2 will be examples of motion. It hasn¹t been started yet, so I¹m
really open to suggestions of your favorite things. I¹m thinking of the
following, you may see how I hope to segue these into one another:

*Tangential and radial accelerations
*Pendulum motion, focusing on velocity and acceleration vectors ala Fred
Reif
*Circular motion and maybe planetary orbits
*Projectile motion without and with air resistance
*Maybe the Coriolus effect on cannonballs and hurricane winds as an example
*Simple harmonic motion since it is everywhere
*Maybe molecular vibrations as an example
*Perhaps some biomechanics application since lots of people are interested
in that area

Chapter 3 will be a chapter about momentum.

Motivating the definition based on understanding of velocity and mass,
calculations of momentum and changes in momentum for different situations.
Conservation, including collisions as example situations where momentum of
the system doesn¹t change.

Chapter 4 will be about forces, using Newton¹s 2nd law to define force as
the time rate of change of momentum. It is possible that this could be done
in chapter 3. What do you think?

Chapter 5 will be examples of working with forces, basically statics
(focusing on free body diagrams) and dynamics.

So, there¹s the first few chapters. As you can see, I¹ve put varying amounts
of thought into each of them. What do you think? I¹m happy to receive
private e-mails, but I¹m really hoping that this opens up lots of
conversations and debate on the list. (But please don¹t reproduce this
entire message in your responses! Only repeat the relevant parts.) Thanks
for helping out.

Bob Beichner