Course Reflection: Classical Mechanics
The next semester starts soon — and I only have one course reflection from the fall semester. I better get on this quickly.
This is the first semester of classical mechanics. What do we cover? Well, it depends. Normally, I start off trying to stick with the textbook (we use Classical Mechanics by Taylor). Of course, there is just too much stuff to really make progress.
This semester, I wanted to make the course as interactive as possible. My idea was to use some of the tutorials available online. I found the Interactive Mechanics Tutorials to be good place to start. Also, the University of Colorado Boulder has some nice resources.
Really, my main goal was to get to Lagrangian Mechanics. Other than that, I went with stuff that had tutorials to go with it. Here are the topics I covered.
- Velocity dependent forces (linear and quadratic drag). This was a good opportunity to review basic Newtonian mechanics (they needed it).
- Vector Force Fields. Work-energy and line integrals. We did real line integrals. It was fun.
- Numerical calculations using python. Of course this in the course.
- Oscillations. There’s actually a bunch of nice physics in the simple harmonic oscillator. It’s good to get this stuff in since the students will use it in other courses.
- Damped and driven oscillations. I think the maths for damped oscillators isn’t too bad. Damped driven is just for show.
- Central forces. My original idea was to get to the equivalent 1D problem for the 2 body orbit, but duh — that needs the Lagrangian. We just did basic orbits and binary star stuff. It was still fun.
- Lagrangian Mechanics. We spent quite a bit of time on this. I didn’t do a bunch of stuff on the variational principle — in the past, the students didn’t get much out of it.
That was it. Overall, a pretty fun course. We did python stuff including the double pendulum using python and sympy. Here are some other random comments.
- I gave students the opportunity to do video reassessments for the standards. For the most part, they just stuck with their inclass grades. Oh well.
- I gave them a “Real World Physics” assignment. I thought they would have fun finding something to apply their physics concepts too. Again, they didn’t really get into this too much. Too bad.
- The python stuff — they started off slow and I had to go back over a bunch of stuff every time we did another program. However, working with computers in class was pretty useful.
- The tutorial worksheets didn’t work so well. I mean, they are great worksheets but the students mostly just worked on them on their own. I think it would be better for them to do the worksheets outside of class and then use class time for discussion.
- A couple of times I just gave them a physics problem and then left them alone to work on it as a class. This worked quite well (it’s a small class).
- I didn’t get to Lagrange multipliers. That will be for the next semester.
