Imagine you have a frosted cake...

My Wednesday review session in the German Room was a very good experience. Ten students this time, and we went over derivations for continuous charge distributions and Gauss's law. When I had gone through Physics 0175, I found it very helpful to use analogies to visualize what was going on in a particular problem. One of the students had difficulty in understanding the area charge density of an object, and how delta q/ delta A was still sigma. So, I had come up with the analogy of a frosted cake. If you have a cake, and the icing is evenly spread across it, then no matter what piece you cut for someone, the ratio of icing and cake will be equal to that of the entire cake. This really helped out, and most students seemed like they knew what was going on after that. Analogies definitely work, so I will use them more. Looking forward for Friday's review session.