I had a very interesting day yesterday in Auckland, at a NZ Engineering Educator’s forum. Here, there were representatives from across the tertiary sector looking at ways of improving the way that Engineering is done at universities and polytechnics. The main speaker was Keith Willey, from the University of Technology, Sydney. He gave some great […]
Continue readingMonth: August 2011
The proton and neutron: same and different
Lately, I’ve been doing a bit of reading about the use of group theory in particle physics. I need to do this because I’m meant to be teaching it in the next few weeks. Now, the education research says I can still teach something without being an expert in it – I just need to […]
Continue readingCrop circles
There’s a great article in Physics World on crop circles. Not a discussion about man-made / weather-made / UFO-made – any sensible interpretation would be man-made – but just HOW do you make such intricate and vast patterns so quickly and leave almost no traces behind. Some of the patterns that crop-up (sorry) in crop […]
Continue readingMomentum conservation
It’s mid-semester break here at Waikato so I have time to breathe and get back to things other than teaching, such as seeing what the PhD students are up to. Yay. But, here’s a comment about what I was talking about last week with the first year students: conservation of momentum. If you look in […]
Continue readingTurning into physicists…
There were a couple of moments in the first-year lab yesterday that made me want to despair: The first one: Student: My magnetic field doesn’t change when I increase the current Me, seeing what the problem is: How do you connect an ammeter in a circuit? Student: In series. Um…oh, hang on…we’ve done parallel, haven’t […]
Continue readingFour legs good
Those of you who own a four-legs will have noticed that they usually exhibit a range of different gaits depending on the occasion. Taking Mizuna our cat as an example – he walks (back-left, front-left, back-right, front-right, each leg a quarter of a cycle behind the previous), he trots (back-left and front-right together – then […]
Continue readingThe dangers of reflective blogging
Friday morning saw me doing my usual Friday-morning-thing, namely work on my PGCert Tertiary Teaching portfolios. (I’ve put in a recurring appointment in my calendar every Friday morning for this semester so I actually get down to doing this task.) As part of this, I’ve been pulling together relevant blog entries on my teaching experiences. […]
Continue readingFriction: Stick or Slip?
Going back to my last entry on the sliding car, it’s worth commenting a bit more on the nature of friction here. When a car goes round a corner, what prevents it from sliding is the friction between the tyres and the road. Tyres are unsurprisingly designed to be able to give a high frictional […]
Continue readingNZ Scholarship physics
I’ve recently had a look at the 2010 New Zealand Scholarship Physics exam, for the first time. (This is the exam taken by the top final year school students in physics – the best performers get rewarded with scholarships that will help them financially at university). The scholarship exams are hard. There’s no denying that. […]
Continue readingTeaching: Theory or practice?
I’ve just finished reading a nice little article by Linda Leach, of Massey University, on the engagement (or lack thereof) of tertiary teachers with education theory. She’s interviewed f tertiary teachers and has identified a number of ways that teachers understand ‘theory’. First, it’s very clear that ‘theory’ means different things to different people, and […]
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