Week of 9/18

This week was forunately a little better than the previous ones, a few students came to office hours and I was able to sort out their problems. One thing that I thought was an important skill that the students had trouble with is identfying the proper equations to apply based on the variables that were given. I think part of the problem is that kinematics uses a lot of equations that all include v, t, x , etc. and it can be hard to figure out which one will get you most directly to the correct answer. One suggestion which seemed to help the students was to break down a big problem into a smaller example, for example when working with a projectile it can be easier to first find the component velocities, then find the time until the projectile hits the ground, and so on until the problem is complete, rather than smushing a lot of equations into one giant one that looks confusing and is hard to follow.