February 15, 2008

In class today we watched a movie about the different job fields that are associated with physcics and chemistry. We saw that there were numerious amounts of different applications of the skills that are learned in physics and chemistry. There are several engineering applications in the world today that involve both physics and chemistry such as mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and electrical engineering. Overall the day was more about seeing what type of jobs are out there if we continue to study science in college and want to have a career related to physics and/or chemistry

Thursday Class Post

On Thursday we spent the majority of the class reviewing the quiz on waves. This quiz was more like the midterm back in January then like previous quizzes. I liked the variety of question methods of multiple choice, graphing and short answer. I thought that some of the questions were similar to what I would have expected for this quiz. I thought that the information was for the most part from the notes and i just made a few careless mistakes. In this unit if you confuse one thing, it can really throw you off. I also got tricked by the last question because i did all the math right, i just did not realize it was roundtrip so i messed that up. Overall i did not think that the quiz was too bad, i just confused a few things and it threw me off, but the quiz corrections have helped clear up the confusion and i now i understand this unit better.

weekly post

We gotthe quizes back, and it went how I thought it did, I just made a bunch of really stupid mistakes, or like reversed concepts in my head. Going over it helped, and explined things that I didn't get. Thanks for taking the time to do that, and allowing us to do the corrections in class.

Also, letting us use some lab time to learn how to use excell was helpful. But I don't know if you really need to devote an entire lab period to that tutorial thing, since there weren't examples/opertunities to do things ourselves. It might be helpful in the future to leave that link on the site, and just make the labs be done with excell and be a bit leniant in the begining with grading on the format. This way if we did get stuck, we could just check the tutorial.

comment

i agree that we learned about waves and frequency....i believe that the pre-quiz is a good guide to what the quiz is gona b on

weekly blog

So, I just finished the quiz, I did't think it was that bad, but there were some things that I didn't know. A couple of questions seemed new, like we hadn't done things like that in class. That seems to happen often with these quizes, that some of the questions are new and random. Its kind a of aggrevating if you do the practice stuff, and then stuff that isn't on those review sheets are on the quiz.

Waves Part II

Yesterday in class we continued learning about waves. We learned about standing waves, which travel in the same medium, have the same frequency and amplitude, but travel in oppisite directions. We watched a video clip and saw some demonstrations to further explain this concept. I think that maybe just one or the other, the deomstration or the video would have been enough, both was kind of over kill and just seemed repetitive.

Then we learned about diffratcion, which is what happens after a wave hits an obsticle, like a wall with a break in it. After it hits the wall, the wave spreads out behind it. Once again, the picture were helpful here, but the video seemd a bit redundent. I think its good to break up notes every once in a while, but too many videos makes the lesson kind of chopping.

Finally we learned about resonance, which is the amplitdue of an object's ocialtion at or near its normal frequency. Once again we were given exaplmes to better understand the concept.

Waves Doppler Effect

In class we leared about Waves and The Doppler Effect. The Doppler Effect is a varation in the frequency when there is relative motion between the source of the frequency and the observer. If the source is approching there will be a higher frequency and if it is Receeding there is a lower frequency. An example of The Doppler Effect is the fire truck siren, which was talked about in class.