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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

My thoughts on the S207 session

Friday 31 May 2013 at 18:26
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Responding to Sally's comments:

During the session we got through rather less than I had anticipated – I think when Alan ran the show last year we covered a lot more. However, I don’t think that mattered too much. I could have run a whole revision week. In fact, maybe that will be the result when I post the material on my forum.

I was also a bit surprised about the seating – I think I moved the front two tables, and then other people set up the rear two and sat at them!  Perhaps I had indicated they should help? Of course, a teacher will expect everyone to crowd onto the back row.

As we were going to be looking at the whiteboard and the screen I felt that a row was the right solution.

The glossary matching exercise proved surprisingly tough. I may need to trim the material down for next year. It also took longer than I anticipated.  However I like the fact it got people moving around and talking, so I would probably keep the format.

The ‘silly mistakes’ section could certainly be trimmed and updated.

For the revision questions I had deliberately not over-prepared myself. I wanted the students to have an opportunity to see plenty of mistakes cropping up, and to genuinely have an opportunity to discuss and solve the problems themselves. I was very pleased when they noticed the cannonball time they had worked out was for the upwards journey only.

The penalty for this approach was that we moved very slowly. To some extent, my inability to see the whiteboard slowed us down.  I think the next time I would probably have my own answers written out so that I could copy them onto the board as we talked. And I would switch to using prepared solutions on the screen after doing the first couple of questions on the whiteboard.

As you point out, the students got through the Part A exam questions very quickly. I thought they would, and we had no need to go through anything on the whiteboard.

I still feel I am at an early stage with S207.  It is very different from the other modules I work on, which often skim the surface of topics. Meeting with students is really helpful in helping me see what they find hard to understand, and in identifying ways to explain topics. The question on spectacles was quite unexpected, so I will give that a bit more thought.
Tags: revision, s207
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

Feedback from the S207 revision day

Friday 31 May 2013 at 18:24
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My staff tutor for S207, Sally Jordan, attended the session, and she kindly provided the following comments on the session:

I know that planning was a bit of an issue – very many thanks for all you had done and for coming so well prepared. I felt that the balance of activities on the day was good.

There was a lovely friendly atmosphere throughout. I felt that you did the right thing in rearranging the furniture, but I was slightly surprised to see that the rearrangement gave us two rows – in such an otherwise informal setting, it would have seemed very strange had some of the students sat on a row in front of the others. I’d be interested to know what seating arrangements you generally prefer for tutorials – I quite like getting students working in groups around small tables, though I know that can be a problem if you’re making lots of use of Powerpoint. I appreciated the name labels and the fact that we all introduced ourselves at the beginning.

The dayschool started nicely on time (and ran to time all day) and I liked the way the agenda was shared with the group. I might have asked right at the beginning if there was anything else they’d like to cover (this sort-of happened – there was a pause and the students seemed very happy with what you had planned). I’d also normally suggest sending the tutorial plan to the students beforehand, either by group email or by posting to the tutor group forums – that gives them chance to add topics for discussion. However, I do appreciate that there would have been several difficulties with this approach on this occasion, and it is also perhaps less appropriate for a revision session than for other tutorials.  The students did get a choice later in the day, which was lovely, and they had the confidence to ask for an explanation of lenses (which you and Robert between you explained quite well).

The first activity (the matching of terms to their definitions) was lovely and getting students to attempt to write a definition first was very sensible and worked well. I’ve always considered this part of the S207 exam to be the most difficult and I haven’t changed my mind as a result of yesterday!


From here we moved onto the discussion of ‘silly mistakes’. I thought this was a good idea, though I might has included fewer examples relating to vector notation and more other things (you could perhaps have given an answer to an incorrect number of sig figs or with incorrect units? – or is that more appropriate for S104 than S207?).

After the summary of Book 2 topics, we moved into the first set of examples and I think these worked extremely effectively to build the students’ confidence in their ability to answer exam questions. With you, Robert, Alan and me all having an opinion as to the best way of tackling the problems I was slightly anxious that the students would be confused, but actually I think these three students will have benefitted from seeing a variety of approaches.

After lunch and Robert’s introduction to the S207 exam and the discussion of  exam and revision strategy,  I really liked the fact that you gave the students the choice of either returning to the examples in your Powerpoint or working through an old exam paper -  and didn’t they do the exam paper well!  After giving them a sensible length of time, you and Robert discussed the questions with them – lovely.

All in all then, an excellent day. You, Robert and Alan have different but complementary styles and your collective knowledge of the subject matter and experience of teaching shone through!

Tags: definition, exam, s207, revision
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

S207 'The physical world' revision day

Tuesday 14 May 2013 at 14:08
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Preparing for the S207 revision day is a big challenge. The module covers such a huge range of physics, so students can ask questions about almost anything.

Last year there were three tutors along, and we relied heavily on Alan Cayless's experience and organisational skills. This year it will be just me and Robert Gibson running the event.

Robert and I exchanged one or two emails about the event, but we did not mange to get into regular contact, so I set out to prepare a plan for the day. I worked around building a PowerPoint presentation holding a set of revision questions and answers, and a very brief review of key topics for each book.

I sent this email to Robert about my thinking:

I have also worked through the "S207 Revision Examples". This is pretty good for the core of our session. I am thinking of turning it into a PowerPoint-plus-whiteboard activity. I would want to emphasise thinking physically about each problem first. For each book we could have a slide of some key physics issues. Then a Question slide. I would ask the students (as a group) to explain the issues and the physics solution method, then let them work it out in small groups. Then a slide of the 'official answer' (or our own version on the whiteboard).


That document needs to be supplemented with some additional stuff for the later chapters. I am sure we could find that amongst the materials we have or get it from last year's TMAs.


We could precede all this with some introductory marks.


And follow it with a review of the question paper and strategy discussion.

Then let the students go through selected 2002 questions.


Also, for students who are really well prepared and who can solve the problems easily we need a few extra problem sheets to keep them occupied.


What do you think?



I soon followed that up with an another idea:

I have also found a set of papers for a matching-definitions activity. I think this would also be useful early in the day to get people's brains working.

Then I sent a draft of the PowerPoint:

 

The attached file is what I have so far. I have added three questions to the existing set, on relativity, the uncertainty principle and particle physics.

Hopefully this is heading in the right direction, and the slides will be viewable across the room?
Tags: powerpoint, physics, s207, revision
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

S104 tutorial - book 7 and revision

Tuesday 16 April 2013 at 14:07
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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.
Tags: hubble, exam, revision, s104, energy, nuclear, reaction, decay, spectra, atomic
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

Review of Elluminate for S282 resit

Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:17
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Edited by Dave Edwards, Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:17

After a bit of reflection I decided to add a few quiz questions to the session.

This did actually help in the session, because the students were very reluctant to speak (though occasionally they did speak). I was very pleased I made this change, because it forced some interactivity.

The session ran to 1 hour 20 minutes. I liked the fact that I managed to review some of the astronomy whilst discussing revision and study skills.

I spotted a couple of minor issues with slides and corrected them afterwards (a version of the file is here . The spray diagram example needs to be replaced next time with either an electronic version or (probably better) a hand drawn diagram with much thicker lines.

There was some technical difficulty for me at the start of the session. I had planned to use my Tablet PC to write on the whiteboard during the session. I also wanted the benefit of my large monitor. However this took me down a path of screen resolution and orientation problems, culminating in the microphone button (conveniently located at the bottom of the Elluminate window) being off the bottom of my screen. I had to settle for just using the monitor.

[4 April 2013]

Tags: spray, elluminate, s282, study, revision, microphone, skill, monitor, diagram, tablet
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Dave Edwards in Edinburgh

Elluminate for Astronomy exam resit tutorial

Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:15
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Edited by Dave Edwards, Monday 8 April 2013 at 10:16

I have been asked to provide two one-hour long Elluminate sessions for students resitting their S282 'Astronomy' exam.

I will follow my original proposal for the task. This was a skill based first session:

Revision skills
Exam technique
Maths skills
And a summary of key physical principles.

My intention was to build a discussion oriented session. As students may not have started revision I do not think quizzes are appropriate. However, some of the examples will lend themselves to asking students to spend a few minutes looking for information or solving problems.

I drafted an outline plan on a sheet of paper. then I started to work on PowerPoint, reusing an introductory screen on using Elluminate.

I used a pdf copy of a module book to extract one page and annotate that with my Tablet PC to illustrate the idea of using diagrams and annotating the module book. this was difficult to do - I had trouble extracting a copy of the page from the huge book. I found a copy of the appropriate chapter only, and managed to delete the other pages.

I also wanted to illustrate the use of spray diagrams. I used a chapter summary section to prepare a hand written spray diagram. I then scanned this in, rotated it and inserted it into the PowerPoint. The quality was poor. I tried to improve the legibility of the diagram but did not manage to find an appropriate tool. It would be too time-consuming to prepare the diagram electronically, so I decided to accept the slide as it stood.

I used an extract from an old exam question to create an exercise on writing. Simlarly for a maths skills example I used an old TMA question part, and the excellent example answer I had supplied to students.

To help me discuss the the revision period I took a hand-drawn diagram from an S282 handout I have often provided to students.

Then I prepared a list of key ideas (extending over four slides)by skimming through the book.

While working through the preparation I kept in mind the need to have dark colours and large text and images so maximise legibility in Elluminate.

I also adapted the first screen to place on the Elluminate site, in the hope that I can encourage students to use their mircophone.


All this work took about six hours.

[1 April 2013]
Tags: spray, elluminate, astronomy, exam, s282, revision, pdf, powerpoint, diagram, annotate
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