There's no hiding my conflicts of interest here. I'm on the New Zealand Institute of Physics 2015 conference organizing committee. I'm also the NZIP treasurer. And I'm a staff member at the host organization. So, to contribute to the New Zealand physics community's biennial event in Hamilton on 6 – 8 July, click on this […]
Continue readingTag: teaching
Messing up the test: the next installment
In the last few years I've been experimenting with the way I test our 3rd year mechanical engineering students in their 'Dynamics and Mechanisms' paper. I've chosen this paper because (a) it has more than a handful of students, and (b) I am in charge of it. When I've suggested to my peers that I […]
Continue readingStatic friction is something sticky (as is Scholarship physics)
In January I had a go at the 2014 Scholarship Physics Exam, as I've done for the last couple of years. Sam Hight from the PhysicsLounge came along to help (or was it laugh?) The idea of this collaboration is that I get filmed attempting to do the Scholarship paper for the first time. This […]
Continue readingModes of a square plate
Alison has drawn my attention to this video. It demonstrates vibrational modes of a square plate by using sand. At certain frequencies, there are well defined modes of oscillation, in which parts of the plate 'nodal lines' are stationary. The sand will find its way to these parts and trace out some lovely pictures. Vibrational […]
Continue readingHow do you teach creativity in physics?
In the last couple of weeks, I've been using Hermite Polynomials in my work. I won't go into what they are (look them up here if you like) suffice to say that they are one of many contributions to mathematics from Charles Hermite (1822-1901), who was himself one of many french mathematicians whose work has […]
Continue readingArchimedes principle: think carefully
Benjamin has recently acquired a 'new' book from Grandma and Grandad: Mr Archimedes' Bath (by Pamela Allen – here's the amazon link – the reviews are as interesting as the content). The story-line is reasonable guessable from the title. Mr Achimedes puts water into his bath, gets in, and the water overflows. What's going on? […]
Continue readingRobot racing
The Engineering Design Show is currently in full swing here, with the competitions for the various design projects. The white-line followers kicked off proceedings. They were pretty impressive, with all but one team successfully being able to follow the (very squiggly) line without mistakes. There were traps to confuse the robots – the line got […]
Continue readingEngineering, lego and line followers
In the last few weeks I've been working with some second-year software engineering students on a design project. Their particular task is to build (with Lego – but the high-tech variety) a robot that can follow a white line on a bench. It's fun to watch them play with different ideas and concepts – there's […]
Continue readingA closing thought for Friday
We are three-quarters of the way through semester A. My Friday afternoon 🙁 tutorial for solid-state physics is still very well attended. Is this: A. Because the students are really engaged in this paper, learning a lot, and generally want to be there, or B. Because they don't have a clue what's happening and are […]
Continue readingWhen does collaboration become collusion?
Yesterday I attended a very interesting discussion on the problem of student collusion in assignments. It's a really grey area that is particularly prevelant in the sciences and engineering. This is the kind of thing we mean: Student A and Student B discuss their assignment one evening. Together, they think through what processes are needed […]
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