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.

In my most recent Electromagnetic Theory class, I was able to show my students how to draw an electric field for two to three charged particles on a two-dimensional plane, using just the graphing feature of the standard spreadsheet program.

Of course we start with the coordinates of the two particles, and their charge.

Then several points around one of the particles will be chosen, for which the electric field due to the two charges will be computed, requiring the right-triangle distances to the charges to be obtained. Then vector addition is used.

Next, using a fraction of the distance between the two points, the next point along the electric field line is determined, and the whole process repeated.

Sometimes the fraction is too large that the step takes the line beyond the position of the second point, so that the lines now reverse direction, being on the other side now.

That’s why one of the important features of their program should be the manual adjustment of the points.

I say the students’ program because after showing them on the LCD projector what the spreadsheet program could be made to do, I told them that it was their project for the upcoming Engineering Week to demonstrate such.

That certainly quelled the eagerness of a certain student who, for some time into the lecture had been sitting at his table on the side holding a flash drive, expecting to be able to copy the file and study it at home at his leisure.

No one will ever know if that was really the teacher’s intention, or just something said on the spot to further reject the students’ opportunism at the expense of not listening in class.

For the first of the three classes in general science requirement mechanics lab to perform the experiment on the composition of concurrent forces, the quiz was something easy, their advantage for being the first class in the week to meet: it was just asking for the four equations of the component method, which for some students had already been discussed in class.

Not only that, but it was at three points each, giving them a possible twelve points over ten.

Session 1521 still does not listen in class, which is turning into a disadvantage. Class dismissed.