September 2, 2009

These are the things we did and talked about in class today:

We talked about yesterday's double class period and how successful it was. We decided that it worked well; not only was it an enjoyable (more or less) way to spend two hours, everyone learned a lot and gained a better understanding of the material that we will be assessed on this coming Friday.

Mr. Burk talked about why assessments in this class should not be stressful in the least. First of all, it is very, very difficult to score an 100 on the first try (if you show mastery of a concept, you will receive a 3 out of 4 and only receive the 4 out of 4 after showing mastery a second time). Also, if you were having a bad day and somehow just couldn't seem to show understanding of a concept on the day of the assessment, there will be numerous opportunities to improve your grade. This method of testing is effective in that you won't go far in this class or in life by just memorizing equations and doing textbook problems over and over again. You must truly understand a concept to succeed, which this method of testing attempts to measure.

Mr. Burk gave us a cartoon printout which at the end had some physics problems involving velociraptors and velociraptor food (i.e. people). We spent about 20-30 minutes working the first of the problems out on the white board. It was a fairly difficult problem that involved calculating the time it would take a velociraptor to catch a person and we needed to use two graphs to solve it, a position vs. time graph and a velocity vs. time graph. The objective was to find the point in time where the person's position was equal to the velociraptors position. This was accomplished by finding the position on the position vs. time graph where the lines representing the person and the raptor intercepted. This could also be accomplished by using the velocity vs. time graph and taking the areas under the two lines (which is equal to displacement) and finding the time where the raptor had traveled 40 meters more than the person (the person had a 40 meter head start).
*By the way, I tried to upload pictures of the work Mr. Burk showed on the white board but I couldn't transfer them into the text box.

We then went over the first page of Homework 2D. The first half wasn't very difficult; it gave you a x vs. t graph and you had to translate it onto v vs. t and a vs. t graphs. The 2nd half was more confusing, showing information on the v vs. t graph. While translating that into terms of a vs. t wasn't very hard, moving that onto the x vs. t graph was much more difficult and took very careful thinking (one of the difficulties lay in realizing that a negative slope on a v vs. t graph can still show forward motion as long as the line still lies above the origin line).

That's all we did in class today. Tomorrow's scribe is Dylan (for real this time).