Week of 9/19
I had two students come into my office hours this week. My
first student had questions from the Exam 1 recommended book problems. He had
trouble drawing vectors and finding their components in order to find a
resultant vector. I walked him through head-to-tail addition and showed him how
to use trigonometry to find all of the x-components and y-components separately.
This was slightly concerning as this was a topic we had covered the second week
of class, and lecture material had since moved on to motion with constant
velocity and acceleration. He was able to work through a few similar problems
under my supervision, and I noted a few more problems in the book he could do
on his own as practice.
Another student came with a question about that week’s
homework set, specifically about a problem concerned with free fall. She had
just come from Dr. Broccio’s office hours, so she had a pretty good understanding
of the homework and which equations to use, however she was having trouble
finding the correct answer. I checked her work and found that her direction was
incorrect, and told her that a objecting falling will fall in the negative y-direction,
and therefore will have a negative value. I reminded her to keep track of
positive and negative direction and this seemed to help her complete the rest
of the homework.
Week of 9/26
I had one student visit my office hours the day of his first
exam. He had a question about a problem that was worked out during lecture. The
problem dealt with projectile motion and combining two equations in order to
find time of flight. I worked through this problem with him and made sure to
point out that the x and y-components of motion are independent of each other,
and this helped him tremendously in conceptually understanding the problem. And
then in order to combine two equations, I worked through solving both equations
for one variable, and then setting those two equations equal to each other. He
was also confused about when to apply the projectile motion equations, so we
discussed the specific conditions under which those equations would be
applicable.
Joe Musiol
Broccio TuTh 2:30-3:45
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