Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I was talking about the students in my general science requirement mechanics lab class final exam complaining that in their lecture class, all the formulas were given.

Of course they had to be given, because it’s bad enough for the students to fail without knowing if it’s due to the fact that they can’t memorize the formulas or just don’t know when and how to apply them, and we are talking about all the formulas given since the start of the class.

With the lab session though, the formulas are just used in specifically the same instances as provided in the problems in the exam, which means it’s just direct substitution, which would require no effort on their part.

I already had some students trying to deduce the formulas or relationships by asking me what the unit of acceleration was. It is meter per second squared, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s already equal to the length or distance traveled divided by the square of the time.

Okay, I’m a little biased, because when one of the more diligent students asked for a clue, especially for the friction, I just told him that is sounds like “fun”. The formula, after all, is that frictional force (f) is equal to the Greek letter that looks like a lower case u multiplied by the normal force (N).

For the rest, I just said (although it wasn’t much of a hint) that the same formula was used in the experiment of Projectile Motion and Conservation of Mechanical Energy, and as for Torque and Rotation, all I said was that Clockwise Torque is equal to Counterclockwise Torque.

Although it was very hard to botch that last question, since both weights were given as well as one moment arm and the other was asked for.

As for Composition of Concurrent Forces, I gave them the most difficult formula to use, Sine Law, that needed them to use the cosine law to get either the third angle or the length of the third side anyway, neither of which was given in the problem. And they had to use that for two of the three given forces at a time to get the resultant.

Session 1087 isn’t “fun”. Class dismissed.