Week of 1/28

This week, I worked with some of my students in preparation for their first midterm. In tackling some Sapling problems regarding Coulomb's Law that they struggled with, we clarified some misconceptions regarding how to assign direction and sign with the electrostatic force, how to examine interactions between particles of different charges, and how to resolve forces with "x" and "y" components. One of the big overarching takeaways from our work this week was: it is often better to leave everything in symbols and work through the algebra to its simplest form before substituting values and calculating numbers.