Members of the group have asked for some time during the next tutorial on revision and exam preparation. I will also need to cover some Book 7 "Quarks to quasars" content.
The tutorial is planned for fairly early in the the book 7 work, so I will focus on atomic and nuclear structure. We have touched on these topics earlier in S104, so there should be a good degree of familiarity.
I looked at an old TMA and decided to base much of the session on two topics: energy levels, spectra and hydrogen-like ions, and on nuclear reactions and decays. I prepared a Word document for me to use, with the questions and answer notes, and with some illustrative material from S104 and S282.
In case we get through that fairly quickly, I printed off some handouts for my Hubble expansion activity. I devised this activity at the start of S104, as one of the 'offical' tutorial resources. It would be useful if we can do this activity, because it links very well with the cosmology online discussion I have just initiated on the forum.
I then worked though the S104 specimen exam paper to familiarise myself with the contents. I will recommend that in the exam students do the Part B question first (presumably a graph), then the computer-marked Part A questions. The two longer questions from Part C should be left until last. I think it should be reasonable for people to aim to get through the exam in around two hours. After doing Part B and Part A I suspect most people will have reached or be close to their 40% pass mark.
I also printed out the short questions from an old S103 end of Course Assessment. We can work through some of these in the tutorial.
Personal Blogs
S104 tutorial - book 7 and revision
Tuesday 16 April 2013 at 14:07
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S104 dayschool - energy and light
Tuesday 16 April 2013 at 09:15
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This was a Scotland-wide day school on S104's energy and light material. I ran this jointly with Laura Alexander.
We both had similar ideas for the tutorial. The only difference was our ideas on the experiment part. Laura was thinking of doing the bouncing ping-pong ball work. However my group had already done that experiment, so we chose to do a laser diffraction experiment instead. This was similar to the work for activity 9.1 and 9.2, but the students actually got the opportunity to do all the work themselves. The aim was to use the known laser light wavelengths to work out the grating spacings.
We worked in groups of two or three. The students had to work out was they needed to do, plan the work, think about uncertainties, make the records and do all the analysis including drawing the graph with the best-fit line.
I provided two HeNe lasers and a red and green laser pen. I carried out the experiment at home beforehand, and prepared a spreadsheet of results and graphs. This gave the spacing as 3.33 microns (equivalent to 300 lines per mm).
A number of people got to exactly the same result. Everyone got reasonably close to my value.
So the structure was SI units, energy dominoes, laser diffraction experiment, then either maths work (Laura) or spectroscopy demonstration. The spectroscopy demonstration included the solar, fluorescent tube, HeNe laser output and the HeNe laser tube non-laser output spectra.
The bulk of the day was devoted to the experiment. This would benefit from some additional demonstration time at the beginning, as people were slow to appreciate what they needed to do.
algebra, collision, conservation, Elluminate, energy, equation, gravitational, kinetioc, law, S104, unit
Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:13
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Preparing the S104 session took a whole working day. It includes six Elluminate quizzes and two screens where I ask students to write on the whiteboard.
The session reviews the law of conservation of energy, discusses collisions, kinetic and gravitational energy transfers, and ends with a 'problem solving' demonstration including some algebra and checking of the solution.
The PowerPoint is available here. Please feel free to use it.
When preparing PowerPoints for Elluminate I need to bear in mind the reduction in clarity in elluminate. Keep the text dark, large and bold. Stretch the contents of each slide to fill the whole slide.
The session reviews the law of conservation of energy, discusses collisions, kinetic and gravitational energy transfers, and ends with a 'problem solving' demonstration including some algebra and checking of the solution.
The PowerPoint is available here. Please feel free to use it.
When preparing PowerPoints for Elluminate I need to bear in mind the reduction in clarity in elluminate. Keep the text dark, large and bold. Stretch the contents of each slide to fill the whole slide.
My first Elluminate tutorial for S104
Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:12
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For the 2013B presentation of S104 we are sharing tutorial activities, and for the first time we are using Elluminate. I have the task of providing an Elluminate session for the whole of Scotland on Book 3 -energy and light.
I did produce an 'energy dominos' Elluminate activity a few years ago for S104 use, but I have not tested it on real students and it is only suitable for use with a few students. So this may not be the time for it.
However - the students will only be two days in to their study of this book so I need to keep everything very basic and I need to explain everything that we do.
They should have read the law of conservation of energy. Kinetic energy, the joule and rearranging equations come early, in chapter 3.
General plan:
Slides about definition of energy, forms of energy, conservation of energy.
Discuss energy transfer in collision (game of pool), contrast immediate an long-term outcomes of the collision and the implications for the energy transfer (importance of specifying the context).
Formula for KE, apply to car.
Transfers between Grav PE and KE (ball thrown into air). Grav PE climbing stairs. Graph of energies for ball.
Movie car stunt - speed calculation. Algebra. Check units and sense.
Algebra - do in Windows Journal AND back up with slides. Quizzes.
I did produce an 'energy dominos' Elluminate activity a few years ago for S104 use, but I have not tested it on real students and it is only suitable for use with a few students. So this may not be the time for it.
However - the students will only be two days in to their study of this book so I need to keep everything very basic and I need to explain everything that we do.
They should have read the law of conservation of energy. Kinetic energy, the joule and rearranging equations come early, in chapter 3.
General plan:
Slides about definition of energy, forms of energy, conservation of energy.
Discuss energy transfer in collision (game of pool), contrast immediate an long-term outcomes of the collision and the implications for the energy transfer (importance of specifying the context).
Formula for KE, apply to car.
Transfers between Grav PE and KE (ball thrown into air). Grav PE climbing stairs. Graph of energies for ball.
Movie car stunt - speed calculation. Algebra. Check units and sense.
Algebra - do in Windows Journal AND back up with slides. Quizzes.
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