Personal Blogs

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.

This second NMR Elluminate tutorial is the core of the NMR tutorial work - it covers interpretation or prediction of the NMR spectra from protons within simple organic molecules.

We were provided with a short PowerPoint presentation of eight slides showing the structural formulae of three organic molecules and the corresponding NMR spectra.  Colour-coded version matched up the lines within the spectra to the chemical groups responsible for them.

As I am not familiar with this subject (apart from the short period spent teaching this module last year) I worked through all of the relevant module material.  I then found that working out the spectral features was relatively straightforward.  There was one feature whose details did not match up clearly to the rules of the simple models we used. I asked for clarification on this from the topic specialists on our dedicated support forum, but did not receive a response before the tutorial. 

The material covered in the PowerPoint was not enough for a tutorial as students would probably not to be sufficiently familiar with the topic to work through these examples within a tutorial. I referred back to the presentation I used last year. I had provided a summary of the rules at the start of this presentation. 

I made a few minor changes to improve the clarity of these slides, including stretching the content and darkening the colours. Then I rehearsed the presentation via Elluminate on my Tablet PC, using the pen to annotate the screens, including writing out the working.

My intention was to get the students to apply the rules for the examples. Therefore I extracted key screens containing the rules and placed them on our group forum for students to print out before the session.

In practise the session ran well. The students, although again reluctant to speak, did contribute and successfully worked through the three examples. They seemed to appreciate the exercise (though I have not had any specific feedback). I provided a pdf version of the annotated whiteboard screens on the forum afterwards.